Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Eastern European disputes/Evidence

Anyone, whether directly involved or not, may add evidence to this page. Create your own section and do not edit in anybody else's section. Please limit your main evidence to a maximum 1000 words and 100 diffs and keep responses to other evidence as short as possible. A short, concise presentation will be more effective; posting evidence longer than 1000 words will not help you make your point. Over-long evidence that is not exceptionally easy to understand (like tables) will be trimmed to size or, in extreme cases, simply removed by the Clerks without warning - this could result in your important points being lost, so don't let it happen. Stay focused on the issues raised in the initial statements and on diffs which illustrate relevant behavior.

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Evidence presented by Deacon of Pndapetzim

Piotrus abused his admin-status battling over Republic of Central Lithuania

On March 12/3 (depending on time-zone), Piotrus was blocked for a violation of the 3 revert rule [1]. Piotrus had been edit-warring on Republic of Central Lithuania, along with User:Halibutt, "against" two or three Lithuanian users. Piotrus added edit-summaries such as "this was all discussed before and this is the preferred version", despite the fact 3 editors were reverting it. He was the only one to breach the technicality of the rule, and was blocked for doing so.

On the #admins irc channel Piotrus used his admin status to misrepresent his "opponents" and by doing so got his block lifted. User:FT2 summarized what took place in the public channel:

Roughly speaking, Piotrus states he has been blocked and that the block was placed by someone criticized for blocks at arbcom [presumably User:TigerShark.] and suspected on an RFCU of IP puppetry on the article in question. He states that being blocked for reverting vandals is not good and claims that as an "experienced admin" he should be warned and does not deserve blocking. He describes the incident as possible sock IP(s) making disruptive edits and states the two users [i.e. User:M.K and User:Lokyz.] are "pov trolls" who have been parties at Arbcom, and that he knows they are sockpuppets and he is mostly sure he knows who of.

FT2 wrote a long summary of the case, from which this is drawn, and saves me regurgitating it:

Visiting IRC to ask for an unblock is fine, as would emailing unblock-l be. But his descriptions of why are grossly inaccurate, his statement that he should have different treatment from the norm when in fact he has breached a more demanding standard as an admin is slightly shocking, and his description of his opponents is questionable, and in fact has now been looked at by two checkusers who feel it is not by any means evident. (It should be noted that I am AGFing a bit here by assuming Piotrus genuinely did have this belief.) He also described a new version as "the preferred version" when in fact it was only his preferred version. In fact a more factual analysis of his claims are that these were not "vandalism" by any definition in WP:VANDAL

This is available at Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Archive134#Analysis. Piotrus, incidentally, also misused rollback during this edit-war,[2] claiming later that this anonymous editor's preferred version was "vandalism", a claim also made by Piotrus' revert-ally User:Halibutt [3], a charge both part of and separate from the other charges mentioned here.

Piotrus' Holocaust in Lithuania caused bad faith

I may not have the endless supply of good-faith that is so frequently the appearance of admins new to situations, but this article was created by Piotrus almost immediately after returning from his block. Although a valid article topic, Piotrus knows that Holocaust-perpetration is one of the most sensitive historical topics in Lithuanian society. That it contained much selective material irritating to Lithuanian users and inspiring of bad-faith was as predictable as a Zimbabwean election, the results being evidenced by "tweaks" such as this (for the scores of others, just navigate the adjacent diffs). And not surprisingly, many tweaks contained hot-headed edit-summaries, and so Piotrus got seemingly what he wanted. User:Lokyz lost restraint often enough to give Piotrus enough diffs, which he was gathering in his secret page,[4] to launch what appears in hindsight to be his clearly planned revenge arb-enforcement thread, the one that resulted in Lokyz' block. Three users, User:Irpen, (and two admins) User:Elonka and User:Angusmclellan expressed the view that Piotrus' diff-list was misleading (effectively dishonest, assuming Piotrus read as he was gathering) and that Piotrus was more interested in obtaining sanction against Lokyz than anything more constructive.(see comments at Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Arbitration_enforcement/Archive19#Lokyz).

In addition to slandering the admin (see above) User:TigerShark (and compare his attempts to exploit, assuming he didn't instigate, the slander-only account User:Koretek for his statement), he also apparently sent TigerShark a nasty email lecturing and threatening him, all because he enforced WP:3RR.[5]

Piotrus uses meatpuppetry for edit-wars

Whenever I've had a disagreement with Piotrus (not as often as perhaps would be convenient in these circumstances), I have noticed that his typical editing behaviour is to revert, scurry to leave messages on the talk pages of users he hopes will be friendly, await a sympathetic comment or two, and use that as an excuse to ignore all the significant issues raised while disingenously invoking policies he must know to be irrelevant and generally being confrontational and disingenuous.(e.g. this and the recent dispute in full (and his contribs in and around his posts there). He appears, in essence, to be a tendentious user with lots of experience as well as the sysop powers he acquired back in the day when standards were ... erm ... different.

Back in the day, Piotrus (primarily, but hardly solely) used - and oversaw - the Polish wikipedian's noticeboard as a recruiting ground for edit-warring tag-teams. This can be verified merely by checking the first half-dozen or so archives of Portal_talk:Poland/Poland-related_Wikipedia_notice_board. See for instance [[6]] where presiding above the board is a template called "Articles needing attention", in fact a list of on-going edit-wars involving Polish and non-Polish users (mostly German and Russian). In fairness, this was mostly updated by User:Molobo, but Piotrus nevertheless frequently used the board to direct hoped-for meatpuppets to assist in his disputes, mainly those with the prolific Russian editor Ghirlandajo. This in its most extreme and blatant forms ended a little more than gradually when User:Elonka turned her attention to it and gradually shamed Piotrus out of it doing it so blatantly (see, for instance, here).

One would naturally expect that, unless Piotrus somehow developed some moral objection to this kind of thing, it would have continued offline. Email is always there, and Piotrus regularly chats to fellow Polish-speaking editors on IM (see the following requests [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12][13], and recently during the Boleslaw I dispute, [14] [15] [16]. From what I can gather, usually when Piotrus has run out of reverts in an edit war, the fourth reverters are most often Tymek, Molobo and Darwinek. However, just the other day it was User:Alden Jones, who magically appeared after a 3 week + absense just after Piotrus' third successive revert was reversed.[17] Piotrus subsequently came up with a story that Alden was a loving fan who reverts on his own accord through devotion to him, despite Piotrus' alleged protests. However, against this inventive story are the following:

• It is more likely, esp given the timing, that Alden was on IM than that he was following Piotrus' contributions at that so convenient point in time
• Alden confessed on his talk page that he went there on the request of another user,[18][19] the only candidates being Piotrus or his guardian angel (of the five editors, he and Alden were the only one reverting to his version) [Alden later posted,[20] presumably at Piotrus' instigation,[21] that someone else asked him ... obviously, ehm, Piotrus' guardian angel]
• Piotrus' condemnation of Alden's revert, despite a long history of reverting for Piotrus and a claim made to Renata that they were good friends,[22] was made in public only after, and on the same day as, Alden had made that confession.[23]

Besides, this is only the most recent instance of his use, Piotrus revert-warring over Trakai Voivodeship in early June:

• 1r, 22:41, June 6, 2008
• 2r, 23:06, June 6, 2008
• 3r, 21:08, June 7, 2008
• 4r, 21:23, June 7, 2008
• 21:27, June 7, 2008 self-revert

and ...

• Alden Jones reverts to Piotrus, "as Piotrus", 21:41, June 7, 2008

Same thing, this time late July, on Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland:

• 1r 20:03, July 30, 2008
• 2r 20:07, July 30, 2008
• 3r 20:13, July 30, 2008

then, the hero worshipper comes to the rescue

• Alden Jones, reverting to Piotrus, 21:33, July 30, 2008

For another instance, in July, see Revision history of Truce of Vilna. You can check Alden Jones' contribs for more; it will also be seen that he does nothing more than help Piotrus, usually at convenient points most easily explained by being requested on IM. Anyways ... I got a word-count limit here, and so I'll end it and leave (for now) other stuff for others. I'd welcome arb requests to supply more evidence or to elaborate on specific points. But to conclude, Piotrus, while his abuse of his \admin powers is limited these days, abuses his [power from] admin status, chronically violates the spirit of WP:BATTLE, and has demonstrated such a lack of good-conduct and personal integrity that his fitness to retain such status must be questioned by all reasonable wikipedians.

Addenda

Comments on the issue-deflection tactics used in this evidence page

It is obviously no surprise to me that the editor whom this arbcom concerns would try to deflect the issues away from himself. I don't presume the arbs to be stupid or lazy, but nevertheless I will make a few comments:

Tag team 1: Russian: Deacon/Calgacus

ArbCom to look at whether Deacon is fit to be an administrator, particularly to consider whether his judgment is good enough to allow him to contribute to AE (in his capacity as an admin, which he employs there with blocks and unblocks

• Inconvenient to him as it may be, I have no pattern of editing-allegiance on eastern European articles. I have no national ideology in this region, being from a small western European country (i.e. Scotland; one can sail to Russia from Scotland directly, but other than that, there's not much Russian about me). I'll be honest, I dislike nationalism and have real problems with the fact that so many ideologues edit an encyclopedia. I don't however see Piotrus' nationalism as the big problem in the context. Rather his dishonesty, tendentiousness and general lack of editorial integrity. If nationalism was the issue I wanted to address, I would have presented my evidence for that purpose.
• I have no pattern of administrative intervention in eastern European articles as I haven't even done so on a handful of occassions (my small admin log will make this negative easy to verify). Despite, Piotrus' wish to lie to the contrary, and though there's no reason why I shouldn't have, I have never actually blocked on an ArbEnforcement thread and the only Poland-related user I've ever blocked was User:Jacurek.

I'm quite surprised that the cheap-shot accussations of Polonophobia weren't nipped in the bud and have continued while I've been away. Obviously, these users believe it will help distract attention from Piotrus' problems or (perhaps more instinctively) that I should be "punished" for bringing this arbcom case, but suffice it to say, I'm sure all arbs will agree they reflect more on the credibility of those espousing them or posting innuendo to that effect, than on any real matters. Even though I said a few impolitic things when I was a relatively new user back in 2006, none of those given "in evidence" even approach "Polonophobia".

It will be noted that Piotrus' evidence section, and some of the evidence used by his friends. fails to deal with the main concerns about his behaviour through:

• 1) ignoring them or at best responding to straw man versions of the arguments rather than the real ones
• 2) lying attacks on the filer of the case, or on other users incidental to the case
• 3) misrepresentation of those are supposed to be supporting him, as well as those who are bringing evidence.

In addition, I would urge all arbs to put in the effort to check all his claims against his diffs and reconstruct all the narratives he has attempted to forward from the bottom up.

Evidence presented by Piotrus

Loosing an uphill battle versus defamation

Important update as of 8 October. I have just realized something disturbing and saddening. The more or less purposeful strategy of my critics - years of defamation, slander and libel of my name - is increasingly successful. Over the past weeks I have witnessed comments from random administrators on AN, ANI, ANIRC and so on, indicating that my name is increasingly tied with edit warring, whining and general disruption (ex. [24], [25]). I've analyzed this process partially in my essay on "mud sticks", but the logic is brutal and simple: if you keep repeating something often enough, a lot of bystanders are slowly and subconsciously going to assume that there is some truth behind those statements (in sociology, we call it a "frame shift"). Reputation is easy to damage by slander and libel, and difficult to restore. I am extremely active and harassed by a above-average number of editors because I've stepped on above-average number of toes. But a lot of bystanders will not think about how active I am, or who is right (consider what would gain more coverage and shape people's perception more: an accusation that a famous person is an antisemitic pedophile, or a later finding that he was a target of a vicious slander?). The average person (administrator) will just see my name in negative context again and again ("oh, Piotrus is at ArbCom again [with the implication that he probably deserves it]", "Piotrus is complaining about...[surely too often]", "somebody is complaining about Piotrus [so they have to be right at least sometimes, right?") leading to an obvious reaction ("this Piotrus is so controversial, there is something surely wrong with him [because if he is in the center of so many problems he has to be the source of them, right?]!"). The damage to my good name is even more painful because unlike all of my critics I have revealed my real name on this project, because I stand by my edits and want to back them up with my credentials. Yet my "reward" for this is that my name is associated with being controversial at the very least, and slanderous terms like "power abuse", "vandalism", "antisemitism", "nationalism" and so on at worst. The last two arbcoms I participated in ignored all the evidence and motions of my critics regarding my wrongdoing, found some of them disruptive, but did not clearly discard those claims nor addressed the issue of my good name, hence the harassment against me (using the same claims as before) continues and the damage to my reputation is cumulative ("mud sticks"). I can only hope that ArbCom will consider a finding along those lines, clearing my reputation and refuting the libel and slander directed by my person once and for all.

A good example from a random discussion on ANI, not involving my person other than in a passing comment: "However the biggest irony about him, is that unlike some active POV-pushers and stalkers like User:Piotrus...". Note that the person stating this, Kuban kazak (talk · contribs), is a long term ally of Irpen and a Russian tag team (I haven't mentioned him in evidence since he has been mostly involved with other content areas than Polish subjects).

Replies to early allegations

I've stopped a few weeks ago, this section is too long already. I'd be happy to answer of clarify any further issues for the arbcom members if directly asked by them.

Meatpuppetry

In addition to my reply in opening statement addressing Alden, who is somewhat of a basketspecial case (see here), I would also like to add that I am not stupid :) Long after the argument "Piotrus uses GG for evil purposes" was first raised I've continued to ask new Polish editors, on en Wikipedia, if they use Gadu-Gadu. I've done so publicly instead of emailing them because I've nothing to hide. I will not be cowed into hiding my good faithed actions (if I truly meant to run a cabal, I'd do it much more discreetly). As I wrote, I talk about Wikipedia and other issues with various editors (not only Poles), some of whom I now count among friends. Sometimes we talk about recent articles and events on Wikipedia just as most active editors do. Never, however, we do so with the intent of "let's start an edit war on some article, bait editor X into 3RR and make the life of a particular group of miserable", as was suggested.

Sometimes I look at edits by my friends, edit or comment on their new articles (for recent examples, see my edits at Polish Radio Lwów, an article I found after looking at Tymek recent contribs, or see this DYK notification, a result of a DYK nomination I made after I saw a promising new article created by Halibutt, which I found by looking at his recent contribs). I've also created and monitor the Portal:Poland/New article announcements and presumably I am not alone. I am sure some of them do the same thing: look at what their friends edit and help out (and vast majority of such edits are not reverts, Alden being the unfortunate exception). That Alden found something to revert (on three occasions - consider that all that fuss is really about three reverts...) is not surprising, since (being in the Top 50 most active Wikipedians), simple numbers explain that I am relatively often involved in some controversial disputes. So three times he looked at my contribs and he found instances where I was recently reverted and joined in... you hardly need a conspiracy to explain that (and how often did he log in and not seen something to revert?). In any case, he is not a very efficient meatpuppet (A, he "helped" me only three times, and B, a good meatpuppet would not be so evident - again, if I wanted to have a meatpuppet, I'd have enlisted somebody, ekhm, less naive :). I doubt there is any cabal: as I've explained here, the kid probably misunderstood some good faith explanation why he should not "help" me that way... There is no bad intent anywhere, rather - there's a normal activity and cooperation, found between any members of a reasonably active WikiProject (and Polish noticeboard doubles as WikiProjectPoland). That WikiProject is no cabal, we were not shamed into changing our name, we did it because it was a logical move and we wanted more editors to join us, not only Polish nationals. Once most noticeboards had a name suggesting they are only for a given nationalities, this has changed and I was one of the people who suggested this early on. Not all noticeboards have done so, but I've no intent to believe that (for example) Wikipedia:Australian Wikipedians' notice board is an Australian cabal :) This was also discussed long time ago at in this mediation.

Finally: since IMs logs are private and often don't exist, the accusation that one uses IMs "for evil purposes" can never be proven (as Biophys pointed out in his evidence below); on the other hand, I believe we have ample evidence here of "bad faith" and "slander" accusing Polish editors of "evil cabalism" (and me of being the arch puppeteer). This continuing slander can be easily proven and should be penalized (it is damaging to our community, as, surprisingly enough, some people don't like to be accused of being part of a cabal; I know at least one Polish editor who told me "in future I want to be an admin, and if I hang around the Polish noticeboard, the usual crowd will veto my RfA because of that". A similar attitude can be seen in this statement by Poeticbent. To put an end to this, I would like ArbCom to consider stating whether there is a Polish cabal, whether accusations of such constitute personal attacks, and whether such accusations going on for years and several ArbCom merit some form of civility parole.

Reply to Boody's "case study"

First, Boody conveniently omits to note that all admins agreed he has violated 3RR, and some (like Black Kite's, who posted at the bottom of the 3RR report in question) supported a block of him. Such selective (ex. citing the few admins who disagreed with me, ignoring the much more common diffs when they agree with me) and highly biased (bad faith) framing of evidence is common throughout certain "evidence" sections here (not only Boody's). Further, at ANI, in order to lessen the edit warring, I explicitly supported (and designed most of the wording) of the agreed 1RR restriction (and later, withdrawn from editing the article altogether, to wait for Committee decision). Lastly, this entire incident shows a failure of 3RR system (when a persistent edit warrior - just see Boody's block log - gets no penalty, his content version remains and he even has the gal to use this an an example to criticize those who tried to stop his edit warring). Similar failure occurred a week before that incident, and several times since. I've described this procedural failing here.

Reply to Irpen

I agree with Irpen that BATTLE-related proceedings turn into a mud-throwing arena, and have unclear and expanding scope, as more and more editors pile their grievances. I also agree that we should not loose focus regarding "the main issues at hand, which is the charge that most of Piotrus' Wikipedia editing is a violation of WP:BATTLE and disruption disguised as "content" and an apple-polishing veneration of "civility""; I'd just like to add that if this charge is shown to be baseless (as was implied by the last two arbcoms in which it was presented - Piotrus 1 and Digwuren), than the arbcom should finally investigate why and by whom has it been repeated for years and years. This may shine some light; along the answers to the following questions: who and why flings such accusations all over wiki and who repeatedly starts and fails to drive those charges through arbcoms, only to repeat this again and again? And what can be done to stop this cycle?

Regarding one's right to collect evidence, see short but "to the point" PS statement by Tymek or my comment to Irpen's earlier criticism here, which can be followed up to his claims and my counter arguments in Piotrus 1 ArbCom a year ago (his claims are nothing new, and I will not repost my old arguments, this arbcom is already too long and complex). The fact that he claimed the very things (that my evidence collection is wrong), and that his claims were ignored by ArbCom then, was and is to me a clear indicator one has the right to collect evidence. I just wish that (as I've requested) this was stated clearly by the ArbCom way back. Isn't it interesting, anyway, that Irpen uses the evidence I have never presented publicly as evidence of my bad faith? There's a different between analyzing user's editing pattern, and publicly criticizing him: despite Irpen's attempts to create an illusion to the contrary, I have not been going around Wikipedia and accusing him of wrongdoing. His case is significantly based on bad faithed assumption I was planning to do what he has been doing to me and others for years. In fact the (private - not advertised, not google'able!) evidence (not all of which I was ever planning on using - it is, after all, just a draft) was to be used only in another arbcom that I expected to be launched against me (and was I wrong?). Also note that this arbcom was not launched because of my evidence gathering - i.e. it's not mentioned by Deacon as the reason for this ArbCom. It's something only Irpen has a problem with (and had for over a year). Alternatively, we can follow Irpen's desires and state that "Piotrus' ability to lodge further complaints should be restricted" or maybe, to be on the safe side, follow the line of thought advised by him in "this activity will continue unless Piotrus is banned from editing"... Because seriously, to have user(s) complaining about Irpen's harassment is unthinkable, is it? That said, regardless of the outcome of this proceedings (which I hope will confirm that I did nothing wrong), I will not keep any of my future diffs on a Wikimedia project. The slight convenience in collecting it offers is certainly not worth the wikidramu it has caused.

I will leave (old...) content disputes aside, as irrelevant to this arbcom (I could restate old grievances, like Irpen's past usage of biased Russian historiography like Mikhail Meltyukhov (which is one of the "referenced sources" I removed - see MM's talk for rationale), but I see no reason for it, and I expect arbcom will not pay much attention to the 2007 and older content diffs presented by Irpen). Regarding Irpen's recent insinuation in his evidence that I try to stifle the discussion there - I've asked for comments on BLPN as soon as the issue arose. I'll just finally single out allegation that I somehow improperly move articles (apparently by daring to use redirect templates): how many of those moves/uses of redirect were judged disruptive somewhere, until now? 0. Irpen even contradicts his own evidence, by showing that I don't edit some controversial redirects and that I even move articles from Polish to non-Polish spellings ([26]). But of course if Piotrus does it, there has to be some evil ulterior motive in anything. QED.

Reply to Novickas and MK

Please see my section on Lithuanian tag team below for specific details. Details of my email discussion with Tigershark should be now known to the ArbCom members; I am sure the members can review this and other cases, determine if the criticism was correct and if those issues are cherry picked exceptions to the rule (as I believe) or represent a common pattern. For this and below reply, please also see my essay here; I will however summarize the main logical fallacy (which kind helpers at WP:RDH narrowed down to "base rate fallacy") of those arguments ("look, Piotrus has been criticized 10 times in the past few months/been uncivil 5 times/edit warred 7 times/etc - thus he is often criticized and is uncivil and edit wars and so on") below:

Let's say than an average editor makes 10 edits per day and is criticized once every 10 days (thus once for every 100 edits). An editor that is 10 times as active (makes 100 edits per day) and is half less criticized per edit (this once for every 200 edits) will still rack up one criticism every 2 days. If one states during a dispute resolution: editor A is disruptive and has lost trust of the community, he is 5 times as often criticized as an average editors because he is criticized every 2 days instead of every 10 days like an average editor will be doing injustice to editor A, who is actually twice less disruptive than an average editor - he is simply 10 times as active... The only "fault" editor A has is that he is 10 times as active as an average editor - should he be ordered to limit his activity? Or should we say that "if you are ten times as active, you should be ten times as civil as an average editor"? Ridiculous, isn't it? I believe I am more civil than the average editor, but I am much more active than an average editor. I've been an active member of this project for 5 years (and diffs from my first year are still cited here...). Based on Special:Statistics: Registered users - 7,927,541; Page edits since Wikipedia was setup - 253,257,531; thus page edits per user - ~40. As one of the Top 50 most active Wikipedians, with ~84k edits (thus 2100 above average) one cannot expect me to be 2100 more civil (and so on) than an average editor. I believe I am much more civil than an average editor per edit or per hour of time invested on Wikipedia, but because I am so active I will accumulate more controversial diffs than most others (hopefully much less than the ~2100 more than average editor would :D).

Briefly, the same holds true for MK's claim about my edit warring (and others; claims that are repeat of his completely ignored by ArbCom claims in the past arbcoms and cite old (2006!) diffs in violation of the amnesty remedy). I watchlist ~3k articles, and I probably watchlist most controversial articles related to Poland. I am likely to be aware through my own watchlist if a problem arises (or as a founder of WikiProject Poland I will be notified of it by others). This, incidentally, is also another important factor in discussing meatpuppetry: because I am so active, and so aware of ongoing discussions, my edits will appear in those discussions/disputes alongside whomever is present there already (and others - friends or foes - will often look at my recent edits/discussions, to figure out where they can help (or hurt)). Now, back to edit warring. If our average editor takes part in one edit war every year (~once in every hundred edits, or once every 350 days), being ~2100 times more active, I fear to even calculate in how many edit wars I should be involved in (depending on some assumptions, the range is from once per two days to 10 times a day :D). Fortunately, revert wars are rare, I encounter one every 2-3 weeks (on average; there are peaks and lull months). And 90% of them is with the same people (the ones who conveniently provided the evidence here anyway). So again, I believe we can conclude that per edit or per hour of time invested on Wikipedia I am actually involved in much fewed edit wars than the average editor

As for the editing statistics on my critics... I wouldn't be surprised to find some numbers pretty interesting. With all of this arbcom going on, I still manage an average of 2 DYKs per week (alongside many other projects). While quite a few of my critics have decided to prioritize criticizing me over doing anything else (see percentage of ArbCom related edits in recent edits of Irpen or Novickas), and their positive contributions are still negligible (see the count of new articles created by Irpen this year and Boody (total of 0...), for example). If a user has no time to contribute to this project other than by discussing (negatively) others, there is something very wrong. Perspective is the key.

It is crucial to understand that I am not making an argument that above-average active editor should be immune to our policies, or entitled to some special treatment and exceptions. My argument is that above-average editors are still just human and will err occasionally, but to say that an old truck driver who had been driving for 50 years and had three car accidents in his life is a more reckless driver than a kid who had been driving for half a year and just had his first accident ("because a person with three accidents has to be worse than the one with just once, right?") is, well, exactly an argument some are making here.

Reply to stor stark7 and Sciurinæ

Please see my section on German tag team below or more details. I certainly agree that use of word nazi (or antisemite...) should be kept to a minimum (and preferably nonexistent). Again, whether usage of such terms represents a rare exception to the rule (as I believe) or a common pattern is the key here. That I've (regrettably) used it on average once per year of my career on Wikipedia resembles looking for the proverbial needle (of my errors) in the heystack (of my general edits).

Reply to Angus

Posted few days ago on talk of the concerned article and addressing all of his points: [27]. Now he repeats his last arguments here, ignoring my reply to them. PS. If I wanted to misquote hard (but not impossible) to get Jaworski's work, why would I have gone to all the trouble of sending Angus a scan of his work?? PSS. In particular, my entire discussion with Angus, I believe, illustrates well my opposition to WP:OWN, and my constructive attitude to resolving disputes - I asked him to join to help merge mine and Deacon's version, and throughout the discussion, I replied to his comments in a civil fashion, in many cases agreeing with him and incorporating his suggestions into my version. I fail to understand why now that we have resolved almost all of the issues he has raised, he chose to comment here instead on continuing our rather civil and constructive discussion there (until a part of his last post where he suddenly assumes bad faith about me).--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 17:28, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Evidence against other editors

Special case: Boodlesthecat

As much as I dislike mud slinging, Boody's disruptive behavior has only increased since the start of this proceedings. I find his most recent comment way over the top fin confrontational battleground creation, and thus - since he already voluntarily involved himself here - I am forced to lay out a case against him. He had some brushes with me recently, and he apparently found out about this ArbCom and decided to air his grievances. Alas, if he wants to bring ArbCom's attention to himself... I guess we should oblige him.

I find Prom3th3an's (mediator's between Boody and several other editors) statement telling. Boody commonly assumes bad faith and posts variou accusations, for example: "Piotrus came into the article and bombed it with 16 fact tags, effectively defacing it. Piotrus has a habit of following me around and challeging my edits, based not on the quality of the edits but apparently on some form of animosity." (anybody can judge for themselves whether this series of edits, in an article I created some time ago, is following Boody and bombing his articles out of animosity...). His attitude culminated as noted here, when he send me several offensive emails ("Your editing tactics are abhorrent and disgraceful for a so-called teacher", "you are such a dick"). He is not shy of edit warring (see his blocklog). He has harassed greg (I have seen few so venomous posts on wiki in my 4+ year career) with accusations of antisemitism (more on that below), and recently started harassing Tymek (see here and scroll down for more "warnings", most blatant one calling a 3RR report a violation of good faith..., see Tymek's evidence section and (Oct'11 update) now targets his content with AfDs and comments "written with a hostility towards Jews"). He made little attempt to compromise so far in the month-long mediation (linked above), showed no remorse or apology for his personal attacks or revert warring, and criticized all of the blocks he got as a work of a Polish cabal (just read here or see his recent unblock requests ([28], [29]). This indicates to me that his confrontational attitude will only get worse before it gets better. Update (Sept 11): Boody just accused me of antisemitism: "stop trying to fill an encyclopedia without outdates, discredited and outright anti-semitic nonsense". Update (Oct 4): Accusing others of "spreading anti-semitic propaganda", "attempts to make this entry into a vehicle for anti-semitic libels", "bullying threats to vandalize articles that contain referenced material you dont like", in addition to removal of citation requests and possible 1RR violation (see history of Żydokomuna, Oct 2-4), now even clear and direct accusations of vandalism, Are you committed to manipulating, distorting and twisting every aspect of this encyclopedia? (Oct 7), "Yet moreJew baiting by Piotrus" (Oct 8), blocked for 2 days (Oct 8-10), succeeding in chasing four editors off an article in the few days since his unblock ([30], [31], email evidence for 3rd one, my own withdrawal), defaming me on talk page: [32] with a lie (my first interaction with him was not this but this (I first met Boody when I intervened in a discussion between him and greg where in his 2nd post Boody accused greg of "antisemitic rant"...), more personal attacks (Oct 11), accusations of canvassing for edit warriors, very definition of bad faith (Oct 12), blocked for incivility on Oct 13 (replied as usual showing no regret)...

Boody had a history of harassment and edit warring before he arrived in the articles on Polish-Jewish history. Since then, in what was a rather peaceful arena, several edit wars occurred and previously stable articles were protected. While I've tried to reach out to him, he posts personal attacks on my talk and elsewhere. If Boody could be given a topic ban from the area of Polish-Jewish history, much peace would be restored to this fragment of EE issue, although some form of civility parole should be also adopted, as his attitude is very confrontational and responsible for battleground creation (before Boody, for example, we were somehow able to raise History of the Jews in Poland to a FA status, without any major incivil disputes; after his arrival it became one of the protected articles, with edit warring and bad faith accusations of antisemitism on talk).

Finally, regarding greg and boody disputes: I disapprove of greg's rather occasional but strong worded criticisms, and support a request to him to refactor his posts for more civility and for him to monitor his performance. On the other hand, I see his attitude much less problematic from the bad faithed attitude Boody displays. There is an important issue of whether greg was baited (as I believe he was) into his more emotional statements by Boody's confrontational attitude over the past few months of their interaction (analysis of Talk:Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, where I believe those editors first met, should provide relevant evidence to address that). In fact, I find Boody's repeated slandering accusations of antisemitism, directed at greg (and recognized as such by others), to be very serious: calling somebody an antisemite should not be done lightly (it's probably one of the worst mud balls out there), and in this case it seems to me to be building a straw man (since I don't believe greg is an antisemite) and a guilt by association (since Boody has implied that anybody who defends greg is an antisemite). In any case, both greg and Boody should be cautioned to be more civil, and Boody in particular should be cautioned to avoid labeling others as anti-semites. Please see also related comments on Boody's accusations by Prom3th3an (linked above) and Vecrumba here.

I would like to however disagree with Greg regarding user Malik Shabazz: there was a strange incident in which Malik gave Boody a barnstar "For going to the mat against a cabal of POV-pushing Polish chauvinists" in the direct aftermath of Boody getting a block for 3RR and sending me the "dick" emails, but for the most part I found Malik to be a reasonable editor, much more so than Boody.

Tag teams

Content disputes are problem only when they lead to revert warring and 3RR blocks. Civility is always a problem. When uncivil editors cannot win a content dispute with their arguments, and turn to harassment and flaming, creating a battleground, this becomes a serious problems. When not stopped, they gain experience and organize themselves into tag teams, becoming the most serious problem and one that ArbCom needs to address.

I'd like apologize to Russian, German and Lithuanian editors, vast majority of whom are not part of the "Russian, German and Lithuanian" tag teams I will present the evidence against below. After careful consideration, I've decided to use those national names for ease of discussion. This is not meant as a slight against those nationalities, and all three nationalities have greatly constructive communities on Wikipedia (which, notably, are NOT a part of this ArbCom). Every community has its black sheep, Polish included. The evidence below should not be seen as fingering particularly disruptive communities, or as a proof of a conflict between ethnic based communities, but as fingering not so uncommon extremists hailing from certain communities whose long pattern of behavior (described at WP:TAGTEAM) is to harass opponents until they leave this project. Please note that the users criticizing me, so far, are all the ones I've predicted in my @ to Andy regarding EE tag teams. Please also note that neutral mediators and commentators quite clearly support only one side of this dispute.

Tag team 1: Russian

Deacon/Calgacus

As I wrote in my opening statement, I am rather disappointed by his confrontational attitude. He did not try to discuss anything with me on my talkpage or via mediaton before launching this ArbCom (the entire "previous attempts of dispute resolution" section listed ancient (year+) issues not relevant to his opening statement). I've addressed his controversial behavior in the content dispute that sparked this ArbCom in the second para of my statement and I'd like to add it to evidence (instead of copying it here). While accusing me of WP:OWN - when in fact I've attempted to merge our versions and kept almost all of his changes (see the second para of my statement linked above for diffs) - it was Deacon who simply reverted ([33], [34], [35], [36], [37], [38], [39]) to his version (aided by a mysterious sock), erasing even my cosmetic copyediting (see my complain here, point 9 at the very bottom). For few weeks it looked to me like his goal was not to allow me to edit the article (one I brought up to a MILHIST A-class) at all. I believe that the entire recent talk there (from here down) is a good example of how "battlegrounds" develop: I assume good faith, maintain civility and try to reach a consensus, asking for outside opinions, making progress in merging our versions due to input of other civil and good faithed editor (ex. Angus), but personal attacks, refusal to compromise and constant reverts by Deacon make progress much more difficult and much more stressful than it has to be. It was only recently (Sept 7) that Deacon seems to have accepted the merger of our versions (thank you, Angus, for the unofficial mediation).

I am seriously disappointed with Deacon's conduct as an admin: several times he has joined Irpen's "criticize Piotrus and Polish editors" bandwagon (not surprising, considering his attitude as Calgacus). His defense of user Lokyz on AE, going as far as (in his opening statement to this ArbCom) to suggest that my complains against a user who accuses me of being on somebody's payroll are harassment of the Lithuanian editors, show a serious lapse of judgment in terms of who is the victim here (see also the first para of my statement to ArbCom for more evidence and arguments). I would like ArbCom to look at whether Deacon is fit to be an administrator, particularly to consider whether his judgment is good enough to allow him to contribute to AE (in his capacity as an admin, which he employs there with blocks and unblocks).

I also believe that statements by Lysy (here), Marting (here), Vecrumba (here) and Temer (here), shine more light on the Deacon-Piotrus issue and thus I am mentioning them and linking as evidence in this section.

Irpen

Irpen has been found uncivil and biased against me in the past arbcom. We very, very rarely edit similar content anymore (due to his inactivity; for the pattern of past interactions, see evidence below by Biophys, and in a wider picture, past statement by Vrecumba), although Irpen still occasionally targets my content contributions with incivil comments (ex. here in April he popped out to accuse me of "hate for Soviet Union" and (Oct 8 update) just now he accused me of "extremely harmful tactic of poisoning (an) article while it went unnoticed and then employing the IM-coordinated revert warring"). The main problem (albeit also lessened due to his recent inactivity) is that Irpen still habitually stalks me, questions my edits and slanders my name with various accusations (ex. in addition to his statement in this ArbCom, punctuating his recent inactivity, here (AE, March) "Piotrus maintains a black book on multiple contibutors off-line" ... "Piotrus, unhappy with the lack of quick action he was seeking shopped for a friendly closure at #admins today"). After last ArbCom, I politely asked him to stop it: He did not reply. Please note that I don't go around Wikipedia, creating bad faith battlegrounds in articles he edits, I don't forum shop to get him blocked or slander his good name, claiming he has violated x policies, is unfit to be here, or such. He, however, still does it; he has been doing it for years. I would this sniping to finally stop. His bad-faith actions are an unpleasant reward for my contributions to this project, and I am not the only victim: his attitude and actions have already chased valuable editors from this project: see my analysis of Balcer leaving, for example, and see an even larger scope analysis noted by Vecrumba here. Update: here's he is disrupting ANI/3RR discussion, stalking an editor (since the violation occurred on an article he had not edited himself) and then accusing that editor (Digwuren) there of nothing less than trolling: [40], [41].

I would like the ArbCom to ask Irpen not to participate in discussing of my person - in other words, to issue a wiki restraining order. Further, given his history - like chasing Balcer off wiki after similar harassment - I believe there may be a need to formulate some ruling preventing Irpen from personally attacking, harassing and slandering other editors, since his confrontational attitude does not seem limited to my person. Discuss content, not editors... he needs to be made to finally "get it".

Irpen's edit count by month and by mainspace - note the proportion of mainspace edits decreasing

Analysis of Irpen's contribs presents an interesting picture: over the years, he has created less and less new articles and other encyclopedic content; he has started 105 articles, most of them in 2004-2005, 24 in 2006, 15 n 2007, only 3 in 2008; on the other hand after 2004 his article talk page count has been steady at ~2500 per year and his wikipedia namespace edit count, increasingly related to arbitration cases and other dispute resolution proceedings, has risen (~500 in 2005, ~800 in 2006, ~1000 in 2007, ~750 this year so far). He has became less active in the past two years, but his participation in discussion has not lessened. His main activities are increasingly (and for over a year, almost exhaustively) discussing (editors...) and playing wikipolitcs. Irpen has returned from month-long wikibreak on September 15, immediately joining this ArbCom proceedings (less than an hour after his return and reserving evidence and workshop spaces ([42], [43]) clearly indicating he prioritizes those proceedings over other type of wiki edits); his first mainspace edit since the end of this wikibreak was a revert, as was his second; in a month since then he has made about 70 mainspace edits - many of them reverts, and about ten times as many (~700) discussion edits, about half of them at this arbcom. Compare the chart of namespace distribution of his edits: total and last 1000. The shift away from building an encyclopedia to discussing it is quite visible. Those statistics clearly show that his activity levels in discussions have not dropped, but his encyclopedia-building edits have diminished both in total numbers and in proportion to other edits. This pattern clearly illustrates increasing radicalization. Perhaps a reminder of why we are here would be useful?

Statements by Moreschi (here), Tymek (here), Marting (here), Durova (here), Vecrumba (here), Biophys (here), Hillock65 (here) in this arbcom, plus Biophys evidence below, shed more light on Piotrus-Irpen relations.

PS. As puzzling as it is, it appears Irpen in his evidence is actually bringing and analyzing evidence against himself I was not planning on using (since I tend not to use too old diffs, or since it doesn't concern me - remember, he is using my draft). Still, if he wants to bring it to light and proverbially shoot himself in the foot with it...*shrug*

Ghirla

While I am disappointed with Ghirla's sudden delurking and posting a criticism of me, mimicking the slandering spirit of Irpen's behavior above, I have had almost no problems with Ghirla since our last ArbCom. I hope it stays that way. That said, it should be noted that Ghirla still ocassionally delurks with battleground comments like this one. This should be discouraged in the manner similar to the one I've described above, less he is made to believe such behavior is acceptable.

Tag team 2: Lithuanian

Lokyz, M.K. and Novickas

I believe that those three users form an experienced Lithuanian tag team.

Lokyz is the most uncivil and likely to create the battleground with his comments - hence my requests (ex. here and here) on AE to make him more civil and less confrontational (please look at those requests for evidence of his long pattern of incivility, bad faith and battleground creation; he has been put on Digwuren restriction list and blocked once for "for incivility and personal attacks"). As the second AE request was derailed by Deacon, Lokyz confrontational attitude continues: [44], [45] While I dislike bringing old diffs, as I stated in derailed AE, this diff may be of interest to oversight (slander of a respected historian).

M.K. is a more difficult case, he creates quality content related to Lithuania but will often join Lokyz in the tag team actions, particularly by launching bad faithed dispute resolutions against his opponents, or simply by stalking them and popping out in random discussions with the tag team tactic of joining the band-wagon of criticism. Here are a few diffs :

• January 3: oppose per Piotrus - a topic unrelated to Lithuania and user's edit, but one where Piotrus is active - hence, oppose if Piotrus supports, and vice versa...
• April 13: stalking
• April 14: bad faithed and groundless comments about other editors

He has first honed this tactic on Halibutt, whom he succeeded in chasing off this project (see Halibutt's statement in last ArbCom and in this one). The continuing bad faith tone of M.K.'s statements in such content disputes in the past, always painting his opponents as evil incarnate, are a good proof of this attitude becoming a long term strategy. Please also see last arbcom evidence against MK proposed by Lysy, and consider that MK himself became the focus of two proposals by last ArbCom: here and here). If they were passed, much wikidramu would not have occured.

The "true believer" POV of this tag team is perfectly illustrated by those diffs: MK removes reference for "extremism" from a Lithuanian political activist ([46])... and uses the very same source to add an "extremism" adjective to a Polish activist ([47]). A different standard for Lithuanians, a different for Poles... While I don't intend to ask ArbCom for a ruling in a content disputes (content we can deal with via normal Wikipedia procedures, civility and harassment - not really), the hostility of the Lithuanian tag team - like the others - is based on their desire to replace NPOV with their (in this case, Lithuanian) POV, and my opposition to such an outcome. For the record, note I don't support whitewhashing of Polish extremisim and I am not arguing for removal of the ref in question (I actually agree with MK that this ref should stay); instead I've long opposed whitewashing of the extremist Lithuanian Vilnija organization, whose publications have been claimed as reliable and used by MK and Lokyz in the past in attempts to portray extremist Lithuanian POV as NPOV mainstream.

Novickas seems to me the least disruptive of the three. He is civil, but his edits display some problems, such as very selective use of sourcing to push a certain POV sympathetic to that of the Lithuanian tag team (I believe his story is a good illustration of radicalization and he could benefit from mentorship). Here's an example of the disruptive POV: [48] - and here's another one: [49] - the desire to include the controversial word "terror" in the article... Of course, he is entitled to his content POV (with which we have been able to deal in the past, via RfC/mediations/ect.), but unfortunately (and this is where ArbCom input is needed), he does join the tag teams in their harassment. His statement and evidence to the ArbCom is very telling: in addition of being a repeat of past grievances, he points out some errors I made in content creation, but does not mention I was always willing to discuss the issue, and when proven wrong I withdrew my objections or corrected the errors myself. It's amusing he criticizes my unreferenced stubs, yet does not mention anything about the referenced DYK content I create at the same time. He assumes bad faith: "probably each delisting will be a battle", despite the fact that I believe my conduct in FARCS was always respectful: proof1, proof2, proof3, proof4. Note also that despite accusations of OWN or similar, I even supported delisting of some of my former FAs... in any case, he misrepresented and twisted evidence against me in a similar fashion in last ArbCom (see my reply there and considered why his evidence section then was ignored). He further cites several out-of-context examples of criticism of me by editors I will fully admit can be considered neutral admins, which would look pretty damning until one considers that with my average of about 2k edits per month and involvement on dozens of articles, if I get criticized on average once every month, well... I am pretty sure the number of criticism of my person by neutral editors per edit is well below the average for this project (not to mention that random, neutral admins and editors who joined this arbcom seem almost unilaterally to support me, not criticize me, and one can find many examples of praise for each example of criticism). But of course the tag teams and bad faithed editors will cherry-pick the scarcest examples and try to build a case portraying them as a normal pattern. Finally, all but one of his edits from September 2 to September 25 (when I am writing those words) are related to this arbcom: Wikipedia is a place to create content, not to flame one's opponents... but apparently, some editors are here to "fight wars", not create content. Bottom line: Novickas shows a lot of bad, bad faith towards me, and this attitude and his evidence fall squarely in line with harassment masquerading as evidence, presented in the past by his curiously inactive tag team buddy MK, and discarded by community and arbcom in successive proceedings.

This tag team has succeeded in chasing User:Halibutt of Wikipedia (proof, proof 2 and proof 3). I remember peaceful days before they arrived, when Polish-Lithuanian topics were not a battleground (this is when I featured Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Halibutt featured Jogaila). Since they became active, Polish-Lithuanian relations have been a constant battleground. I would strongly suggest a topic ban for those three editors, and putting Lokyz and M.K. on a civility parole.

Please note the way they portrays claims of common detractors of my person - Irpen, Novickas - as "community proof" and "consensus" of my wrongdoing. This is again a tag team tactic: Members A and B state X, member C will later claim their agreement as "proof of consensus"... see one of many example: his statement here "Already such Piotrus "cases" were identified as unclean attempts" and the old discussion. Note how the tag team members defend each other, creating - particularly for newcomers to this issue - the illusion that many members share similar views (this is why before this Arbcom started I have identified all the tag team members - and there are not that many, about 5-6 active). They use this illusion - as I've shown above - to create an illusion of community consensus, whether to condemn another editor ("look how many people disagree with him and criticizse him") and to defend each other ("look at this poor editor, unfairly accused by the editor we all disagree with"). Again, all of this is discussed at WP:TAGTEAM.

PS. Update (Oct'8): it appeared that one member of the tag team, inactive for months, have just delurked: User:Dr. Dan. He is one of the "best" flamers I have ever seen, specializing in battlefield creation and disruptive edits (despite his recent inactivity he has managed to place himself on Digrwuren restriction list). Please see my evidence here and here (because he was inactive for months, it is unavoidably out of date, I am afraid). Note that he was instrumental in chasing of User:Beaumont from this project ([50]).

PS. Update (Oct'30): it is sad that the only Lithuanian administrator, User:Renata3, is showing signs of radicalization. She has (for years) steadily refused my requests to mentor extreme members of the Lithuanian wiki community, and her lastest edits here - "evidence" criticizing a Polish editor for... creating content, coupled with pure censorship (simple removal of mentions that places in modern Lithuania had something to do with Poland in the past: [51], [52], [53]) is a sad example of another common form of Lithuanian POV (past example to demonstrate trend: see how Polish name disappears in this edit by Lokyz). In this context, I should probably clarify that Halibutt, who has been chased off primarily by Lithuanian tag team, was primarily guilty of trying to create content related to Polish-Lithuanian history. Anyway, the content dispute is not relevant to the arbcom, what is relevant is how her bad faithed comment about Polish editors (me and Poeticbent, for example) contribute to creating a battleground.

Tag team 3: German

Matthead, Stor stark7, Sciurinæ

Respected editors such as Moreschi (here), AGK (here) and Tymek (here) have pointed out the disruptive role User:Matthead plays as one of the most active German "tag teamers". His silence here is interesting, particularly as two other active members of this tag team have risen up in his defense: Stor stark7 (here) and Sciurinæ (here). Note that both of them try to divert the case from Matthead and their own actions, by focusing the attention on their long time sparring partner, Polish editor User:Molobo, and are following enshrined tag team tradition of dragging out year+ old diffs to support their cases (Molobo has a problematic history and was once blocked for a year, hence making a good guilt by association beating men).

I would like to note that the issue at hand is not content, but (again) harassment. I disagree with the POV represented by this tag team (which could be variously described as ranging from "Greater Germany" to "neo-Nazi", see statistical breakdown of articles most often edited by Stor stark7, for example). However, with the exception of Matthead, the other users (including some who are no longer active, ex. User:Jadger) have rarely engaged in strict civility violations or more importantly, 3rr violations and extensive edit warring. They, like everyone, have right to their POV and to its due representation in this project. Undue, of course, is kept out (by me and many other editors). If the ArbCom wants, I can address stor stark7's content claims in more details, for now I will note they are bad faithed and have never been endorsed by neutral editors (for example, I removed early refs to Blanke per WP:V because they were misattributed and couldn't be verified, I removed dubious German sources with non-neutral claims like "The dead in Bydgoszcz included priests, pregnant women, children and the elderly" and so on). The entire lenghty section about a single diff presented by stor stark7 here not only omits the confusing actions of an IP editor who was reverting both of us ([54]), but also completely ignores my main argument there - that this entire para was mostly irrelevant to the article (as I explained in this edit summary, which stor stark7 misrepresents in his section as refusal to discuss...), adding a trivia/undue weight fact promoting the idea that in 1939, Germans had a moral right to invade Poland because Poland might have contemplated invading Germany in 1933... and so on, we can discuss 100 similar content issues. The only problem that ArbCom should address is the the increasing pattern of harassment of my person and other editors, as Matthead - but also Stor stark7 and Scrucinae - have increasingly voiced their criticism of my person (and other editors) across Wikipedia (presumably, as was pointed out by several other editors in their statements, cited above, because if they cannot ensure their POV is unduly represented due to my enforcement of NPOV, smearing my name and chasing me away from this project may be the way to achieve it). In essence, behavior of Matthead, Stor stark7 and Scrucinae towards editors they disagree with is very similar to that displayed by Irpen or M.K. (going around various project spaces, chipping in with criticism and complains wherever unrelated issues related to the editors they dislike are being discussed). Few examples: Matthead defens Lokyz and attacks me, Stor stark7 placed on Digwuren's list, Matthead blocked while on Digwuren's list, Sciurinæ pops out in a medcab case not involving him or articles he edits and criticized Polish editor's side, Sciurinæ slips that his previous post was an "attack"... and of course their joining of this arbcom, cherrypicking a few out of my ~80k edits (Sciurinæ's "evidence" is the "best": his only diff of me in 2008 is my... evidence post here) to build a case against me.

I do find the POV "Germans were victims and Allies were the victimizers" highly offensive, but in retrospect, however, I can see how label "neo Nazi" (which, according to Stor stark7, I used three times over my four years here (or in 80k edits) - what a great amount of evidence to build an arbcom case, isn't it? has anybody built a case on less diffs? :)) could be seen as offensive, I do apologize for having used it before and I promise I will not use it in the future (it would be helpful if a complain about me using it was made to me before ArbCom).

Bottom line: disruption and battlefield creation by Matthead may merit special attention to that editor. Stor stark7 and Sciurinæ should be asked not to harass other editors.

Final comments

Editors differ. Some are clearly disruptive, some are only occasionally so. Combined, I believe that there is enough evidence above to finger several most disruptive ones, tag team leaders or activists, who create uncivil battlegrounds, hoping to wear down their opponents, and whose ban or parole would both give others something to think about and vastly stop battlegrounds from occurring in EE topics.

In my ending comments, I would like to point out to two circumstances:

• all editors critical of my person are the same ones (Boody being the SINGLE newcomer) who have been critical of my person for the past two years. One would expect that if I am the problem, I would attract more criticism. As noted, before this ArbCom, I have (incidentally, but in retrospect, luckily) noted "who is who" in tag teams in an email to a respected admin and ArbCom clerk. All editors critical of me were who posted in this ArbCom were listed there, and very few of those listed have not posted here yet. This should prove it's not a "war between communities", but a "war between extremists and a community". I authorize Andy (AGR) to fwd my letter to interested ArbCom members, or quote it (or paraphrase it) on Wikipedia
• on the other hand, dozens of neutral (and many non-Polish) editors have posted in this (and past ArbComs) with their support of my person/side and criticism of the same small group of tag teamers: from Wikipedia talk:Requests for arbitration/Piotrus: Durova, Darwinek, Appleseed, Poeticbent, Evrik, Beaumont, Fabartus, Balcer, David Gerard, Pmanderson, Zscout370, LUCPOL, William M. Connolley, Hillock65, Tulkolahten, DGG, Biophys (17 total) and from Wikipedia talk:Requests for arbitration/Piotrus 2: Lysy, Moreschi, AGK, Tymek, Martintg, Durova, Prom3th3an, Poeticbent, Biophys, Vecrumba, DGG, Temer, Hillock65, Halibutt and greg (14). I believe that many different voices are enough to warrant a comment that "community sees a problem, and I am not IT".

Last comment: please, no more general restrictions or rulings. We all should know we are here to build an encyclopedia in good faith and so on. Most of us is doing just that. We need to deal with the few people who are not. For that, we need rulings about specific editors: whether they are the root of the problem (if so, ban or parole them, so they stop) or victims (the latter is important to state clerly so targeted editors will not be subject to eternal rehashing of old accusations). In past two ArbComs (Digwuren, Piotrus) I noted that this entire mess will return unless specific editors (the same few...) are finally fingered and stopped. I hope "thrice the charm". Otherwise, see you all at ArbCom Piotrus 3 in 2009, and for no.4 in 2010 a few of us may get commemorative badges or such :) Signing off, _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 17:08, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Evidence presented by Moreschi

General comments

There are some editors - indeed some admins - who, while patriots, are reasonable people open to useful discussion and do not do obnoxious nationalistic bias. There will also be some ostensibly reasonable people who are clever enough to side-step 3RR, but unfortunately view everything through the prism of obnoxious nationalistic bias. It is the job of arbitrators to tell one from the other.

Matthead

Matthead (talk · contribs) does not have an illustrious history. In the old days he was largely notable for edit-warring with Rex Germanus (talk · contribs). Rex was a Dutch chauvinist with a bee in his bonnet about Germans: Matthead was the ideal German nationalist for Rex to edit-war with. This includes mutual socking: Wikipedia:Requests for checkuser/Case/Matthead and Wikipedia:Requests for checkuser/Case/Rex Germanus.

Battleground tendencies are the main problem here, as we can see from the various AE reports: [55], patent block-shopping after peaceful resolution of a dispute, [56], (see in particular Elonka's comments), diffs here, stirring the pot here, [57]. Moreschi (talk) 14:14, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Irpen

It is worth noting that Irpen's most edited article is Holodomor, with 418 edits. This article is shockingly woeful (hard to see how it could be worse, really). It's not quite the full expression of modern Russian nationalistic sentiment that it could be, but it's not far off. He also has 72 edits to Denial of the Holodomor, which is better, but not great either. (more to follow)

Evidence presented by Sciurinæ

Piotrus - Boodlesthecat

In this arbitration, Piotrus refers to Fear's talk page that it "should provide relevant evidence" against Boodlesthecat and redeem Greg park avenue's statements because this first meeting would prove Greg park avenue as a victim of Boodlesthecat's alleged baiting. The opposite is the case.

It begins with Piotrus creating a completely damning reception-section (see the article's state when this DYK was sent in) and he hurried to submit the biased article in this state to DYK ([58]). What peace did Piotrus mean when he described "articles on Polish-Jewish history" had been "a rather peaceful arena" before Boodlesthecat arrived to try countering the one-sided presentation and got to know Piotrus and co?

Dislike for Gross

Greg park avenue, Piotrus, Poeticbent and Tymek all disliked the Princeton History professor Jan T. Gross and they all revert warred together against Boodlesthecat.

• [59] "I just cannot stand this gentleman and his shallow way of explaining history, therefore I will refrain from editing his bio, as my edits would be too biased. Greets" (Tymek, January)
• [60] "Fear is already cheap propaganda shot" (Greg, May)
• [61] "on the top of this you want to litter it even more with Gross' inarticulate and pathological anti-Polish rant in the form of quotes." (Greg, May) (Greg still claimed that he "never took sides": [62])
• [63] "Gross made fool of himself - he could sell this bullshit in America - NOT in Poland - one bridge too far." (Greg, June)
• [64] "This one, once a featured article, and several other historical articles, dealing with Jews in Poland and Holocaust in Poland, have been littered recently by inserting findings based on quasi-scientific references by Jan T. Gross and Klaus-Peter Fridrich (there may be more), who rely their "research" more on communist propaganda than on original records." (Greg, August)
• [65] "But it has been explained once and for all in relevant Wiki articles concerning Gross' that his "mistakes" are of magnitude of at least 1, that his references are based on communist fiction/propaganda from years ago, and no one, not even one respected educational institution has ever corroborated his findings." (Greg, September)
• [66] "Gross’ and Wiesel’s Polonophobia" (Poeticbent, May)
• [67] "Quality sources like Gross?" (Piotrus, July)
• [68] "I believe I mentioned earlier that Gross is not the main problem. He is a symptom, not the disease." (Piotrus, August)

BLP violations

Boodlesthecat had shown sensitivity about personal attacks against a distinguished writer and law professor, Thane Rosenbaum. Greg park avenue's comment (a blatant BLP-violation) was used as the base of a really shameless revert war. When Piotrus restored it, he also threatened Boodlesthecat "next time you change other's users talk I will simply block you for vandalism",[69] as if he had changed anything, as if that could fall anywhere near "vandalism" (Piotrus still needs to be told what vandalism is: [70], [71] [72] [73] [74]) and as if a scandalous BLP violation on a talk page was of less importance than a completely irrelevant and insulting comment. In fact, such BLP violations could impose a danger to the reputation of this project. Thanks to Molobo, whose soapbox-campaign isn't enamoured with a key publication on Prussian history, the Cambridge historian Dr. Christopher Clark apparently already had to complain about "actionable lies" in Wikipedia: [75].

Greg park avenue also made another conspicuous WP:BLP violation against Gross in a main-space article (keeping the source, making it look like a referenced statement, he inserts "There are more of such innovative but scholarly unreferenced writers around, the most recent is Jan T. Gross."). In the edit summary he also calls another book of Gross "another hoax".

When this arbitration started, User:Vecrumba supported Piotrus to argue on Boodles' talk page - right under the name of a German historian - that "German scholars are keen to continue to take Nazi propaganda known to be factually contradicted to paint a picture of the Germanless Holocaust in Eastern Europe.", a scandalous statement. He even spells the full name of the German scholar (who did not argue for a "Germanless Holocaust" of course).

Rogue unprotection

The issue was raised on the BLP/noticeboard, where it also got the attention of an uninvolved administrator, Gamaliel, who decided to keep an eye on what was going on and took charge of the case to some extent. After two sysops spoke up for page protection ([76] [77]), Gamaliel protected the article. Instead of using the normal request for unprotection, Piotrus misused his admin tools to revert the page protection. Gamaliel restored it. Piotrus then preferred starting an AN/I thread instead of a normal request for unprotection.

Poeticbent's comment at this AN/I even contains: "If you are not a Polonophobe, please step back and take a deep breath." So Gamaliel is better of not engaging any further, or else his name may be smeared with accusations of anti-Polish sentiment similar to Deacon or Boodlesthecat, who "is convinced of his own self-righteousness and that Poles are evil" ([78]) and as a "true believer" with one of the most dangerous of mindsets, not worthy of discussion ([79]), a troll to be in a cage ([80]). Interestingly, Piotrus' main argument that no edit warring would follow: [81] [82], turned out wrong as soon as Gamaliel unprotected it days later and reverting continued.

Teamwork

Foul team play

All of the Polish-Jewish revert wars involving Boodlesthecat that were reported had been versus Piotrus, who was always supported in them by his instant messenger buddies and only by them: [83] (report), [84] (report), [85] (report), [86] (report), [87] (report), [88] (report), [89](report) [90](report), [91](report). Besides Piotrus, the participants were his instant messenger buddies Alden Jones ([92]), Tymek ([93][94]), Poeticbent ([95]), Molobo ([96][97] [98]), Greg park avenu ([99]), Logologist/Nihil novi ([100]). The only probable exception to this was the involvement of Xx236 in the fourth one - who came after the article was on-wiki canvassed on the Poland-related noticeboard: [101] [102] despite Piotrus having been warned for canvassing last year. Piotrus also defended his old national canvass agitation against Ghirlandajo.[103]

Piotrus always has a team at hand that reverts for him and that defends each other. For example, when Charles complained about Darwinek's conduct, Piotrus and Molobo ad hominem'ed Charles ([104] [105]) and tried hard to get him blocked ([106]). After Molobo got community-banned Piotrus tried liberum vetoing him free ([107]), which he must have known to be wrong ([108]). Piotrus handed out a warning for accusing Poeticbent of 'vandalism' ([109]) but Piotrus would also hand out a warning for complaining about getting accused of 'vandalism' by one of his friends ([110] [111]). After his team got under attack by a new user, Piotrus bit ([112]) - an admin threatening an unwarned newbie already of "banning". After Tymek once made three reverts on an article, Piotrus favourably protected it ([113]). When Tymek was reported for something else, Piotrus would turn up to acquit by equating him with the reporter ([114]) and later also opposed another ANI thread of the reporter this way.[115] See also the evidence by others, especially MK's #Coordinated_edit_warring. As well as that, take into account that Piotrus uses external communication to take advantage, as is already evidenced by the IRC case and by the forum case, #Evidence_presented_by_Tiptoety.

Shifting the offence of tag teaming

Consider that over the years there have been multiple condemnations of concerted team play on the part of Piotrus. Piotrus traditionally tried to dismiss them, framing them as "cabal" conspiracy fringe theories. One of the users who made them was User:Elonka (see medcab 2006 case). In March this year, she was attacked on the basis of the old issue and said about her old comments that she didn't see anything that she was ashamed of ([116]). On top of that, later she was the creator of the tag team article ([117]). Piotrus knows exactly that there is little or no difference between "tag team" and "cabal" accusations ([118] [119]).

In conclusion: thanks to Elonka's bringing in "tag team", it's not as easy for him anymore to dismiss accusations of foul team play as "cabal" conspiracy theories. This was no doubt disconcerting for Piotrus because it can be proven that Piotrus has engaged in collaborative disruptive actions with instant messenger friends.

In response, the scheme is that a foul attack is the best form of defence. Now that accusations of tag-teaming can be made to an extent, he nonchalantly made unexplained accusations of tag teaming of others, including in this arbitration, raising the likelihood that accusations of tag teaming in general get dismissed in a false compromise (whatever his critics can produce could be seen as one opinion that could end up getting compromised by the most extreme counter-demands: [120] [121]). The success of the preemptive attack to demonstrate it can be abused was already evidenced: In direct answer to Piotrus' personal attack of Lokyz and Matthead as what he called a "perfect illustration" of tag teaming ([122]), the tag team essay was requested for deletion ([123]).

In reality, Piotrus still wants to argue that accusations of foul team play are assumptions of bad faith ([124]) and still suggested that making accusations of tag teaming is wrong ([125]). The way he does it is disrupting Wikipedia to prove a point (WP:POINT).

Mudslinging

Battlefield mentality

The following statements from this arbitration show Piotrus' intimidating tactic of throwing mud at whoever criticises his conduct. A foul attack is the best form of defence. He openly insinuated to the readers that he muddies people (he used the term "mud slinging" and "mud throwing") on the basis of their mere testifying against his conduct.

• [126] "As much as I dislike mud slinging, (...) since he already voluntarily involved himself here - I am forced to lay out a case against him. (...) Alas, if he wants to bring ArbCom's attention to himself... I guess we should oblidge him." (8 September 2008)

• [127] "Finally, all but one of his edits from September 2 to September 25 (when I am writing those words) are related to this arbcom: Wikipedia is a place to create content, not to flame one's opponents... but apparently, some editors are here to "fight wars", not create content. Bottom line: Novickas shows a lot of bad, bad faith towards me, and this attitude and his evidence fall squarely in line with harassment masquerading as evidence" (11 September 2008)

• [128] "Irpen, it is not my desire to drag you (or anybody else) through wikipolitics mud throwing contests. Since we didn't have any problematic wiki content disputes in months (if not years) I didn't plan to involve you in any dispute resolution unless you made yourself involved in it first. I presented evidence against you only after you've joined the ArbCom and made it clear you'll present your evidence against me." (16 September 2008)

• [129] "Please note I'd not be complaining about it if you haven't made yourself involved here" (18 September 2008)

• [130] "I cannot declare a one sided ceasefire, just as in real world a country with nuclear weapons would be foolish to declare a one-sided dearmanent. Sad, but it's realpolitik. (...) Evidence against you was not gathered to launch a sudden attack on you, it was gathered in case you decided to launch one on me. (...) I can promise you, again, that if you don't do criticize me, I won't criticize you in return." (18 September 2008)

Shifting the offence of mudslinging

This is what his accusation "They chase away other contributors (who wants to play in a mud arena?)" as well as his sentence "fear of being targeted by mudslinging after becoming involved here" really mean. The fact that he uses it to imply the other side actually did what he does is again part of the strategy described above (#Foul team play), preempting the predictable accusation that he does so. Given his smear attacks, he has WP:POINTed out the "mud olympics of arbcom".[131]

Also note that in the above statement he admits to using realpolitik ("I cannot declare a one sided ceasefire, just as in real world a country with nuclear weapons would be foolish to declare a one-sided dearmanent. Sad, but it's realpolitik."), which Piotrus personally described as justifying anything, no matter how foul. Wikipedia is the front line, after all.

Piotrus' mudslinging in this arbitration

Instead of describing relevant user conduct, he simply referred to nine critics of his conduct as extremists. He also contrived a "German tag team", stigmatized it as neo-Nazi and threw me into it (actually, I identify with center-left!). After #Shifting the offence of tag teaming, there is now also accusations of extremism. Why would the person who is the de facto mastermind of a national front team and in charge of creating bitter conflicts with Jewish editors do that? The attempted equation again was even verbalised: "word nazi (or antisemite...) should be kept to a minimum". Deacon, too, had to be portrayed as anti-Polish by Piotrus - to Piotrus the effectiveness of it apparently justifies the use of the old but misinterpreted diffs (in same comment he complained about "the rehashing of old accusations and diffs" that should "finally stop!").

He knows exactly that maligning people as Nazis was completely unacceptable. He could know it from the Darwinek arbitration case ([132]), where a similarly prolific user ended up desysopped ([133]), or from the Digwuren case ([134]), where Petri Krohn ended up banned for a year ([135]) and there also being an additional warning issued for all editors ([136]). Piotrus also "apologized" and complained ("I do apologize for having used it before and I promise I will not use it in the future (it would be helpful if a complain about me using it was made to me before ArbCom).") while doing the offence. Although I expressly asked him to retract it given that he even knows it was wrong, he evidently refused and still maintains the mudslinging paragraph. The second calculation can also be read in his reply: "Again, whether usage of such terms represents a rare exception to the rule (as I believe) or a common pattern is the key here." He actually thinks he's allowed to slander people every once in a while. After all, he's already decided on mudslinging. It also appears there are editors who followed suit in this arbitration, like Molobo or like Poeticbent, who uses the term Einsatzgruppen. But then again, Piotrus has always got away with anything. Sciurinæ (talk) 17:15, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Evidence presented by User:greg park avenue

Support User:Piotrus against the above mentioned adversary(ies). The evidence lies clear on the hand if I may use a German idiom, right here. I don't bother with our Lithuanian friends - they were pals or allies of us polacks since centuries - we always get along and will find common ground, mind just Boody and his obvious supporters/sockpuppets who seem to try to impersonate negative stereotype of some particular minorities - a role they don't fit in. That must end once and for all, at least here on Wikipedia. I am for one state Israel/Palestine, see my user page, not very popular idea yet - there is no common ground there - both sides try to undermine each other using all possible ways available including inciting hate against each other. The ones most active in English Wikipedia edit warriors use this tool to antagonize Polish, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Germans, Jews etc against each other. They the provocateurs in my experience descend from the former priviledged special forces class known in Poland as SB (2 million), in USSR as KGB (??? zillion), stripped from the prominence after the fall of the Soviet Union and holding the grudge for that, still they have access to significant funds in form of fat social security checks and unlimited time to spend behind their own PC bitching about almost anything and anybody while their younger fellow citizens must struggle to survive, forget about owning a PC. Polish fora say Onet.pl are full of them. Hundreds of bullshit comments delivered every minute even in the middle of the night. Didn't look at that chickenshit lately, don't have to, next time I access English Wikipedia, I'm afraid it'll be the same or very close to that until someone does something about it. My best advice is to follow Piotrus comment - strictly enforce WP:CIVIL or give up this project. greg park avenue (talk) 03:42, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

More evidence regarding User Boodlesthecat disruptive and uncivil activity - this section was added after the user in question sent hate mail to Piotrus which included words you are such a dick see User_talk:Ryan_Postlethwaite/archive18#How_WP:CIV_works. These diffs are just samples of his comments posted on Talk of Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz following his obsessive reverts: [137], [138], [139]. Most of my posts were called anti-semitic rants and ALL MY EDITS of this article which were many see [140] were reverted by this user or his mirror accounts User:Malik Shabazz or User:Malcolm Schosha etc. see [141]. Not even one of my edits survived. For Malik's disruptive activity see [142] - this barnstar was granted after the hate mail mentioned above was sent to Piotrus while Boody was temporarily banned (48 hrs only). greg park avenue (talk) 22:25, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

Proof of sockpuppetry User:Boodlesthecat = User:Malik Shabazz

When someone maintains more than one account, it happens all the time he or she forgets to log out from one account and log in to another account when switching the identity, and then he sends a post written by one person but signed by another. The classical example you can find here:

I have no problem adding additional reliable sources that put forth other estimates, I was clearly objecting to outright removal of the figures given by Friedrich. I doubt if we will find a "most popular 'average' estimate", and probably will have to cite a few reliable sources and their estimates. User:Boodlesthecat 18:05, 12 August 2008 [143]

That's fine. Are we ready to unprotect the article? User:Piotrus 18:57, 12 August 2008 [144]

It's okay with me. My objection was the replacement of the range with the single estimate. Malik Shabazz 02:51, 13 August 2008 [145]

It's not a decent sockpuppet. Both accounts are disruptive, rude and abusive. Boodles accuses of antisemitism almost all editors who are against him: And threatening to block me for complaining about vicious, anti-semitic attacks against me? [146]. How attacks against him might be anti-semitic, if there is no shred of evidence he is of Jewish descent, neither on his user page, nor in his attitude. Jewish editors react usually like that: [147], not like Boodles who obviously is an impostor. Most his edits in mainspace are reverts - removing decent material, restoring junk. It's a major disruption to Wikipedia in selective areas, and it should end, earlier the better. I hope the other honest editors would revise their opinion about Piotrus until they don't want to be put into the same bag together with the Boodles/M Shabazz team (though I think is only a tip of iceberg), and ask themselves what side they want to be - Wikipedia (Piotrus) side or the troll side? (greg park avenue (talk) 16:54, 10 September 2008 (UTC))

The search of of about 20 talk pages [148] shows the tag team Shabazz/Boodles plays the good/bad cop routine. Usually it looks like that: Shabazz makes series of reverts [149], [150], [151], [152], [153], [154], [155], then Boodles makes series of reverts [156], [157], [158], [159], [160], [161], [162], [163] (3RR) and enters the discussion with his usual claims concerning civility of other users. After the discussion becomes heated, Shabazz enters the picture and makes some concessions, which are only temporary and for show. Their insistence prevails and the article in the end takes the designated by the team form, simply because the other users are too tired of this feud and give up. All these articles including Fear ended just like that. However, the claims concerning antisemitism or uncivility of other authors are almost never confirmed, see for example comment by User:John513 here. The author of such claims is mostly Boodles, but Shabazz also shows his "bad cop" face now and then, see User Talk:Jacurek. They both are simply inseparable and identical in sharing interest and opinion. If you switched the signature under any edit, no one would see the difference.

User:Malcolm Schosha

No traces of sockpuppetry found. The similarity of opinion is simply coincidental. He even uses American "toward"unlike Boodles/Shabazz who use British "towards". It seems like he really is a native of Brooklyn as stated on his user page. I apologize for suspecting him. greg park avenue (talk) 23:42, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

User:Jeeny

Another example of a bad cop/good cop performance by a tag team immediately predecessing Bodlesthecat - Jeeny/Shabazz [164]. About 35 encounters on talk pages, they're always on the same wavelenght [165] working in concert as a tag team against other users as for example User:Taharqa or User:Egyegy on Talk:Appearance of the ancient Egyptians/Archive or on Talk:Black people/Archive 17 - see [166] , [167]. Common denominator - race, religion, antisemitism and controversial people as Boodles' proteges are: Karl Marx, Ralph Nader, Al Sharpton. Lots of reverts in mainspace and personal disputes on talk pages regarding speculative references. Jeeny was indefinetely banned from editing for personal attacks [168] at the time Boodlesthecat became active and took over making reverts to the articles Jeeny was heavily engaged in as Neo-Nazism, Racism in the United States etc.

User:M0RD00R

An account dedicated solely to removing Polish names from English Wikipedia and to Pogroms in Poland. [169], [170]. No matter how small pogrom, all are listed and referenced by even the most POV-ed sources including communist propaganda. The featured article History of the Jews in Poland written mostly by dedicated users User:Jacurek and User:Piotrus was contaminated by this and degraded to non-status. Of course, User:Malik Shabazz et al follows him everywhere and makes the appropriate reverts. M0RD00R doesn't make many reverts, just supplies the references; he's a producer, not an edit warrior, nor a personal attacker. For some MRDR may translate into Methicilin Resistant Data Repository or something like that meaning some Jewish organization dedicated to preserve the history of pogroms. Don't count on it, if so, they would list all pogroms across Europe, not just Poland. Another emigree with a grudge against Poland, no one else, but no sockpuppetry has been proven. Call it a tag team.

User:Slrubenstein

Wouldn't bother with this fellow, if he hadn't visited my user page [171] with an obvious trolling, accusing me of race-baiting, asking all those why questions which are more statements than questions and advising Boodles as a consultant to personal feud how to get Greg, must see this - give 'em enough rope. An account dedicated to race and religion, hidden admin, mostly behind the scenes, loves Karl Marx as apparently as Boodles does, see [172], diff [173]. On the subject of Karl Marx see also [174], [175]. According to Boody anyone may be anti-Semitic but Karl Marx, according to Slrubenstein three lines will do to get over with, better yet to make a separate article, lol [176]. If I ever looked for who is the master sockpuppeteer, the guy is my suspect. Been around since 2001, doesn't edit much lately in mainspace, mostly on talk pages, the years of experience working against him - if I may use a line from Titanic.

Summary

That's all folks. Will insert more diffs later, now I am kind of busy in real life. The above statement has been prepared to show how many obstacles User:Piotrus has to deal with on a daily basis. Still, he's overly productive and honest; too amenable in my opinion yet. In comparison to the above mentioned team, Piotrus ain't got no tag teams, no one to lean on. Just take a look at the last battle field Lwow pogrom (1918). Only User:Tymek, who evidently is familiar with the area, ocassionally edited it beside him, no one else came to the rescue, not me, no Poeticbent, no Molobo, no Halibutt. Better take a look at the other side combatants - everyone is there - Shabazz, M0RD00R, Slrubenstein, Boodlesthecat (all four accounts plus Jeeny use British "towards" but don't use "realise" or "enquire" suggesting ESL and European descent with Jeeny based at one time in Boston and San Francisco) - only a bugler is missing to anounce the roll call. greg park avenue (talk) 00:30, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Evidence presented by Biophys

No solid evidence against Piotrus

Perhaps the most troubling are the comments made by other admins about Piotrus. However I can see a serious problem with such evidence because it is cited out of context. This is like a selective citation of witnesses, without witnesses actually present at the process. I would suggest to completely ignore this evidence, unless a person who originally made the statement comes forward and explains his position right here.

The claims about Piotrus were briefly summarized here by Irpen.

• There is evidence that you repeatedly sought sanctions of your content opponents.... Yes, but seeking sanctions on violators of policies is always appropriate, regardless to any content disputes.
• There is evidence that to do so, you meticulously sifted the edit patterns of people.... Yes, but collection of evidence on violators of WP policies is allowed and must be encouraged.
• Some say that Piotrus "provokes" incivility and "bad faith" by other users when he makes content edits, as stated above by Deacon. This argument is wrong and belongs to victim blaming category. If incivility can be caused by any content edits, this is entirely fault of the user who violates WP:CIV, not the user who edits the content and does not comment on another contributor.

Some critics accuse Piotrus of edit warring. But one should use some objective criteria, please. How many blocks did he receive for edit warring? Only one, and that was long time ago. What is the percentage of reverts in his edits? Is it higher than for other admins?

A lot of statements about Piotrus are actually not supported by direct evidence or exaggregate minor problems. For example, "He called me Nazi", said Stor stark7 below and provided this diff. Sorry, but this is not so. Perhaps the edit summary by Piotrus was questionable and could be discussed at an RfC. But there is huge difference between criticizing a person ("Stor stark7 is Nazi") and criticizing article content: "let's remove whitewashing of Nazi crimes from this article". The latter is allowed, because there are publications and historians who indeed whitewash Nazi crimes.

Irpen and his team

There is a serious Russian propaganda team led by Irpen. This group constantly wages battles with users from Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Latvia, Estonia, and Russia. This should stop. Different users are recruited for every "battle", but several things remain common: (1) the leadership by Irpen; (2) a careful support of the group by Alex Bakharev; (3) the timing of the battle coincides with campaign against the corresponding states in Russian press; and (4) some apparently non-Russian "allies" are also recruited for the next battle. This is the major problem with the Eastern Europe political subjects.

I believe this team indeed includes Irpen and Ghirlandajo, as Piotrus said, but it also includes a few others. Most of them were sanctioned by ArbCom or by individual administrators (Krawndawg/LokiiT[177], Vlad Fedorov, User:Miyokan, User:RJ CG, User:M.V.E.i., User:Petri Krohn and User:Russavia), but others do not (User:ellol and User:Alaexis). Please see below my evidence why they do belong to the team.

As about Alex Bakharev, he mostly provided a personal protection at the ANI for the members of this group, including Irpen, Vlad Fedorov, ellol, Miyokan, RJ CG, User:M.V.E.i., and User:Petri Krohn (one could easily provide diffs). Thus, the involvement Alex in this case and negotiations with Irpen [178] came at no surprise. He went as far as launching a personal attack during this case, which he never did before.

Promotion of Soviet propaganda by Irpen

This case is a combination of a "propaganda versus science conflict" and "national" issues. Irpen and his allies promote Soviet propaganda ideas that are offensive for users from other countries. To achieve this goal, he uses writings by non-notable "historians", like Mikhail Meltyukhov, who considers Soviet war crimes and crimes against humanity as something very much reasonable (see below). That is why Irpen and his allies remove reliable sources by famous Western historians like Robert Conquest: revert by Irpen, revert by Alex Bakharev, again revert by Irpen, and again revert by Irpen. That is why they use self-published sources on the internet to "discredit" academic books [179]. "Is an email being used to override peer-reviewed literature? Good God!", said uninvolved User:Sarvagnya in last diff.

As usual, the people who promote pseudoscience pretend to be good experts, but their sources and behavior (see below) betray them. Few people dare to resist this team; one of them is Piotrus. Everyone who resists this team becomes an object of harassment under pretense of legitimate content disputes.

Soviet occupation battle with users from Baltic states

The Digwuren case was initiated by Irpen. This conflict was about the Soviet propaganda legend (promoted by the Russian group) that Baltic peoples asked themselves to be occupied by the Soviet Union before the war, and they were grateful to the "liberators" hereafter. You know the members of his team in this case [180]: Irpen, RJ CG, Ghirlandajo, ILya1166 also known as Miyokan, and a couple of others. The timing of the battle coincided with anti-Estonian campaign in Russian press. The recruited non-Russian "ally" was Petri Krohn [181].

Three years of Soviet genocide battles with Ukrainian users

A sustained edit war was waged by this team against Ukrainian users. Most recent battle happened to coincide with anti-Ukrainian campaign in Russian press. The recruited "ally" was User:Relata_refero (a few others like User:Jo0doe are apparently Russian users). They fight over Holodomor, which is like Holocaust for Ukrainians. One can look at the synchronized edit war by Irpen and Relata in Holodomor denial. After a brief exchange of opinions, war get started:

• Round 1, insertion of "multiple issues/OR" template - 15 identical reverts by Irpen

[182] [183] [184] [185] [186] [187] [188] [189] [190] [191] [192] [193] [194] [195] [196]

• Relata does exactly the same, 15 identical reverts:

[197] [198] [199] [200] [201] [202] [203] [204] [205] [206] [207] [208] [209] [210] [211], and more.

• Round 2, deletion of "Holodomor" template - 7 identical reverts by Irpen

[212] [213] [214] [215] [216] [217] [218]

• Relata does the same, 5 identical reverts:

[219] [220] [221] [222] [223]

Also note that Relats refero made this ultimatum to prevent presenting this evidence to ArbCom.

Irpen also owns article Holodomor. The article is bad. I tried to bring more scholarly sources. But Irpen did not allow this to happen [224] [225] [226] [227]. Of course I tried to debate problems at the article talk page, etc. Please see this for details.

And they are doing such reverts already for three years [228]. It is time to stop.

Stalinism crimes battles with Polish users

The battle with Piotrus and some other Polish users (most of whom are now retired) is ongoing for a long time, as clear from this and previous arbitration cases. All examples below are about the same problem: Irpen and his allies are trying to whitewash Stalinism crimes, no matter if the victims were Russians (as Gavrilov in second example) or Polish people.

Example 1. Iren promotes writings by Mikhail Meltyukhov. Meltukhov belongs to modern Russian "historians" who tell that executions of civilians or unarmed POWs by the Soviet regime (classic war crimes) were justifiable and reasonable, very much like someone could try to justiy the Holocaust. I explained this here and here (this is whole discussion). Obviously, Irpen has no other choice but to use such "sources" to justify the Soviet repressions. Several attempts by Piotrus to dispute Meltukhov as a reliable source led to these "BLP" accusations by Irpen below.

Example 2. Defense of Brest Fortress. This defense was an icon of the Soviet war history, something everyone in the Soviet Union was proud of. But it was “Polish nationalist” Piotrus who created and greatly expanded this article about Russian heroes starting from the old version of Brest fortress. Now, it is the turn of Irpen. After making several minor changes in the article, he began an exhausting discussion with Piotrus. One of main contention points is the fate of main celebrity, Russian hero Piotr Gavrilov who was later imprisoned to Gulag.

In the beginning of this discussion Irpen admits that Gavrilov was sent to Gulag[229]. However later Irpen changes his position in favor of an old Soviet propaganda version (that Gavriolov was never imprisoned) [230]. Unfortunately, Piotrus does not know Russian and can only use Western sources. He asks me for translation. After being confronted with Russian sources about the imprisonment of Gavrilov [231], Irpen still disputed the sources and achieved the elimination of Gavrilov’s imprisonment from the “Fortress” article. Finally, it was “Polish nationalist” Piotrus who created another article about Russian hero Piotr Gavrilov.

Example 3. Przyszowice massacre. This article is about an important but a local event. Therefore, it was described mostly in the Polish press. The sources obviously satisfy WP:Verifiability. An extremely long, exhaustive, and completely unfounded discussion has been initiated by a banned user Vlad fedorov [232] and by Irpen [233]. Even asking for 3rd opinions [234] did not help much. An edit war of several users including User:Vlad fedorov followed.

Irpen, Alex and Deacon

An "ally" recruited for this case against Piotrus was apparently Deacon. Let's get facts straight.

1. The long-standing animosity of Irpen and Piotrus is well known.
2. Several months ago Irpen "was shocked beyond what he cold describe" by discovery of the Piotrus' "black book" lost in the Polish wikipedia. He shared his "frustration" with a "very small group of Wikipedian he respects most", one of them Alex Bakharev [235]. We do not know who other respected wikipedians were, but Irpen tells that Deacon is not one of them [236].
3. We know however that on August 10, Deacon suddenly interfered in a controversial Polish capture of Kiev (1018) article. He starts by deleting a Polish map [237]. Deacon never edited this article before, and this is far from his usual subjects. However, this article was previously an object of a prolonged dispute between Irpen, Piotrus and other users.
4. After talking with Irpen, Alex Bakharev interfered in this article on the side of Deacon [238]. See also evidence presented by Piotrus above for detail.
5. Deacon made only 22 blocks during his admin career. However, in the midst of the recent Ossetain war, he came forward to block three non-Russian users who tried to NPOV the enormously pro-Russian article about the war: a user from Baku, a user from Netherlands reported by the banned User:Miyokan [239], and a user originally from North Caucasus reported by a Russian SPA [240]. This is not to challenge the blocks by Deacon.
6. Deacon and Irpen made similar reverts in the same article Holodomor denial: [241] [242]. Deacon of Pndapetzim never edited this article before and he did not justify his edit at the article talk page. However, this article was an obsession of Irpen (see long series of his reverts in the evidence below).
7. Deacon was not very actively involved in the Irpen-Piotrus discussions, except making funny "jokes" like that.
8. See also evidence by Martintg below.
9. Deacon said that he initiated this case only "to address Piotrus' behavior" [243], which is very strange [244].

Protecting Vladimir Putin

They also battle Russian users who are not "pro-Putin". Such users are quickly identified as "foes". Criticism of Putin causes very angry reaction [245]. The foe is immediately labeled as a "Russophobe" [246] and undergoes harassment. For example, Irpen is always ready to tell that "outlandish remarks [about Putin] like this in public fora are completely outrageous" about ordinary content discussions [247].

In another episode, User:Colchicum said that Putin is "out of control" using a standard Russian colloquial expression. He immediately became an object of a legal threat by User:Ghirlandajo ("I also recommend you to consult the Russian Criminal Code (article 319). (Ab)using Wikipedia for criminal activities is sort of subversive., said User:Ghirlandajo) [248]. Later Colchicum created article Decommunization in Russia and therefore was harassed by Irpen. However, when he deleted an aggressive comment by Irpen from his talk page [249], he was immediately "greeted" by Alex Bakharev who tells that it was he who supposedly attacked Irpen and reminds about possible blocks [250].

I also had a similar incident described here [251]. User:ellol came uninvited to my talk page, asked what I think about Putin, and then issued a threat. However when I complained to the ANI, Irpen and Alex Bakharev came to rescue ellol and "explained" that I wrongly translated the threat from the modern Russian semi-criminal slang. No, I did not [252].

Team strikes back

Actually, I was in a state of a "peaceful coexistence" with that group (which means not editing any articles like Human rights in Russia or Freedom of the press in Russia by me), but a round of harassment had started precisely at the moment when I made my first comment in this Piotrus-2 case: [253], a comment that I soon withdrew. The events occured in the following order:

1. An outing of me took place by User:Miyokan
2. A notice about indefinitely blocking my best talking partner in wikipedia (now banned User:HanzoHattori) was placed at my talk page [254], by Alex Bakharev, in reply to a sudden comment by User:Alaexis who was a member of a self-identified team with red "KGB" userboxes: Alaexis, Miyokan, and Petri Khron. The re-blocking Hanzo was an interesting story. First, Alex Bakharev suggested him to register as a regular user [255], but when Hanzo re-registered as "Captain", Alex Bakharev reblocked him on the both accounts [256] [257], after the requests by Alexius and User:Stor stark7 (who also commented in this case). Sure thing, everything was done "by the rules". See also my reply to Alex Bakharev here.
3. When I provided some evidence here, this campaign accelerated, enforced by Russavia (talk · contribs). He follows bad example by Miyokan and also places an "FSB brigades" red userbox. He also places an additional box "This user believes that polonium is a valid sugar substitute", hinting at the fate of "traitors".
4. Alex and Irpen argued at ANI in favor of Myokan [258] who was later banned (Myokan collaborated previously with them both, teamed as User:Ilya1166 with Irpen during Digwuren case, and received a barnstar from Alex[259])
5. Irpen came to my talk page and suggested to use my right to disappear - please see a conversation here. "Abandon this account and start editing from a different one ... you don't even need to notify any admins of your actions.", said an experienced administrator Irpen - is that a good advice or a mouse trap? If I followed the Irpen's "advice", I would not present anything here. This "advice" by Irpen sounds too familiar after the previous "advice" given by Alex Bakharev to Hanzo.
6. Relata Refero issued me this ultimatum. Relata Refero collaborate with Irpen, as I presented in my evidence above.
7. I expanded a number of articles on Russian state security services here, including Alexander Litvinenko, Russian apartment bombings, SVR, FSB, GRU and many others. Not surprisingly, I sometimes use quotations about the Soviet KGB, simply as a figure of speech. However, when I used such quotation recently [260]. Irpen took this citation very personally [261], although I did not mean it at all [262]. Please note that my first statement was not directly addressed to Irpen, but I simply expressed my frustration about this ArbCom case. But he decided to answer in this manner. The quote of the journalist tells: "we", it does not tell "you"; it is not addressed to anyone personally.

Supporting the leader

This harassment campaign culminated when User:Alex_Bakharev started criticizing me personally: [263]. He accused me of paranoia and firing unsubstantiated accusation with regard to other users, which I never did. For example, he said:

"I really find "jokes" by Biophys accusing people he has disagreement with to be a member of FSB web brigade troll squads or murderous hit men to be quite offensive. I happen to be a butt of one of them some time ago. In my company the only response to such a "joke" would be a slap to the face. Still I guess an anonymous over thousand miles of his internet can allow throwing mud without risking to have some facial damage."

But I never accused anyone of that! Alex brought this a year-old story apparently to discredit me as a witness: Here are the diffs:

1. Another user (not me!) accuses Alex Bakharev of "corruption".
2. Here I replied after intervention by Irpen to support Alex.
3. Then, I politely asked everyone to leave my talk page (it was not me who started this discussion!) and deleted the entire conversation as inappropriate [264].

You can look at the article mentioned in the last dialog: [265] - this is last normal version, since it has been completely re-edited by ellol and others during this Piotrus-2 case. See also an additional discussion about this [266].

Actually, we had good relations with Alex before this case. I believed he attacked me during this case only to protect the leader of the team.

Disclaimer and conclusion

I must disclose that I have certain bias that may or may not be relevant to this case: [267]. User "G." in this segment means this: [268]. Would it help if Giano was a member of ArbCom right now? Note that I never talked about this earlier, and I am not going to debate or investigate this matter in a future unless asked by others.

Once again, this is only a disclaimer of my bias in general. I did not tell that Irpen or anyone else actually implemented plans "A" and "B", although this is something entirely possible, in light of the recent CAMERA lobbing case. My point about Irpen was different: Yes, there is a tag team led by Irpen, as Piotrus and some others said. If you prefer to ignore his activities, that is going to be bad for the project, just as it has been already bad.

Answer to Irpen

Irpen replied below. He provided precisely zero evidence that anything I said was wrong. His only "evidence" is selective (misleading) citation of me. His "arguments" are as follows: "This is outrageous! This is nonsense! This is not possible because this is impossible." Note that I do not have any significant content disputes with him. I provided this evidence only because I care about wikipedia and good editors like Piotrus, and because this project might be indeed in danger, as the battles in the EE political sector are visibly escalated.

I wonder why Irpen and others fight with users from other countries. Because they are Russian patriots? But Russians were primary victims of the Stalinist repressions. Therefore, there is nothing patriotic in promoting Stalinist nonsense by Meltukhov and others who re-wrote history textbooks on the orders from Putin's administration. There is also nothing patriotic in deleting sourced information about Putin's billions placed to his secret accounts. These tens of billions are stolen from Russian people. There is also nothing patrioric in demonising Georgians as Russavia did. Russians and Georgians are Orthodox Christians who lived in peace and friendship, without any ethnic or religious conflicts (this is nothing like Jewish-Palestinian conflict). Should Georgians be demonized because Putin ordered the war? Yes, this groups is trying to protect something or someone. But what or who are they protecting?

Evidence presented by Stor stark7

this has been made into policy by being linked to from here. Piotrus actions should be viewed in light of that.

Serious POV pushing

My friction with Piotrus originates with his oft-time support for Molobo. Molobo follows me even into the Pacific. [269] and Alliance shopping there [270] there. (My reply by the way)

• Bloody Sunday (1939)

It started with this little Piotrus & Molobo real-time charade on the talk page.[271]. What it in reality revolved around was the review by Professor Richard Blanke of two Polish books (JSTOR link) that Piotrus seemingly wanted to get rid of, for example by claiming it did not exist. The problem seems to be that the book reviewer identifies that the the 5th column theory was a Polish Communist regime official thesis, and that the reviewer dismisses it as Polish communist and nationalist propaganda. (He is very critical of the reviewed Polish book)

After Piotrus many edits to the Bloody Sunday article the review remains there as source for a number of sentences, some erroneously as far as I can tell, but strangely no mention is made of the reviewers critique as propaganda of the quasi official Polish position promoted by the communist dictatorship and still followed by many Polish historians. Only close to the very end of the article, and using another source, is a very timid mention of "bias of communist era Polish historiography".

To quote from the source, on the works of the Western Institute, a prolific Polish issuer on Germany related works:

"anti-German slant of most of its projects have reflected an unpopular, Soviet-imposed regime's belief that to perpetuate the idea of eternal German-Polish enmity was key to its own efforts to justify that regime's existence in Polish eyes." "According to this quasi-official thesis, Nazi Germany instructed the German population of Bydgoszcz and surrounding areas to congregate in the city and mount a "diversionary" attack on Polish forces. The problem with this work is that other historians, "third-party" as well as German, present a pretty good case for seeing this event quite differently."

A causal glance at the article might give the impression that it now is neutral, unless one realizes that what the article presents as an equal weight argument between German scholars and Polish scholars is in fact an argument between Democratic German and Democratic 3rd party scholars, against Polish scholars who for 50 years followed the Party line, and as the reviewer pointed out some Poles such as Jastrzebski still regurgitate the party line even after the advent of freedom of expression.

• Recruiting help to Bromberg

[272], [273]

• Operation Himmler (Abuse of sources)

Piotrus used the book review as a source in another article too. [274], where he restated the communist thesis [275] (see whats hidden at the end of the very long edit). Note that no mention whatsoever is made of the used sources critique of this quasi-official Polish Communist regimes thesis nor that German and other neutral historians dispute it, and in fact the way he wrote it makes it look like the review instead confirms the whole sentence when in fact it only support the "inflated to 58,000" part.

That's abuse of sources, and very heavy POV pushing.

Accusations of Nazism and of blackening Polands reputation

• Nazi accusations No.1 "neutral version restored, Nazi whitewashing reverted..."

Considering this rule I'm curious to why Piotrus has received no warning since he directly accused me of being a Nazi[276]. All I had done was after an anons blanking restore to the version that Piotrus had previously agreed upon[277] in March after I had been forced to ask for 3rd opinion due to his behavior.

• Use of - or approval of - sock puppets.

This edit was left unchallenged, and this is reminiscent of the 2 actions of this sock puppet account, first here and also here. In the second case at Bloody Sunday accusing my edits of "propaganda". Rather than reverting this obvious vandalism edit this "user" was welcomed by Piotrus and the revert used as basis for further edits by Piotrus.

• Nazi accusations No.2

After my encounter with Piotrus at Bloody Sunday, and his help to Molobo at other articles I tried to get some help at the Admins forum. This only resulted in Piotrus launching a Nazi accusation against me as defense: "in my experience 99% of edits from this periodically editing account involve whitewashing (or plainly removing) references to Nazi crimes during WWII"[278]. My response. [279].

• Indirect Neo Nazi accusation

Accusing an IP of being "likely a sock of some neo-Nazi"[280] and then requesting check user for that IP against me and Scurinae.[281] --Stor stark7 ^Speak 18:18, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

• Forum shopping and Accusation of black washing Poles...

This accusation[282], apparently directed at me. And some associated forum shopping. [283]. Odd in light of this notice[284] to Molobo at the end of his 1 year block, a notice never enforced by the way.

To sum up, Piotrus crosses the line, he often hides it well under a blanket of other edits, but at least he should not be allowed to do it while wearing the Armour of respectability that adminship for better or worse provides, especially not when accusing people of being Nazis when they reinstate previously agreed-upon text....--Stor stark7 ^Speak 17:10, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

User Molobo and Piotrus

User:Molobo and User:Piotrus are often seen together in main-space and on talk pages, sometimes just minutes apart.

[285], [286], [287], [288], [289], [290], [291], [292], [293], [294], [295], [296] (Note Piotrus pushing the POV term "Regained Territories"), [297], [298], [299], [300], [301], [302], [303], [304], [305], [306] Note, I've just provided a sample of edits to show that they edit in the same fields, often very closely. I believe Piotrus is the Admin who's most well aware of what Molobo edits and how he edits. If we discount Molobos own talk page then Piotrus talk page is the 3rd most frequented talk page by Molobo, with 78 edits[307]. They share info and jokes. [308], [309], [310], [311], [312], [313], [314], [315]

Regardless of whether there is any off-wiki communication or if they regularly check each others edit histories it seems that they are well aware of each others edits. This points to a real problem here. Molobo, as Piotrus admitted in the evidence section by the statement - "has a problematic history and was once blocked for a year, hence making a good guilt by association beating me" - has a troubled edit record. Molobo has been blocked many times, including a one year term, and recently indefinitely. And Piotrus, in his role as Administrator and as someone intimately aware of Molobos edits, has done nothing visible to moderate Molobo (unless we count this completely unenforced notice that both seemed and indeed was too good to be true), instead that task has fallen upon other Administrators who now and then have encountered Molobo. In-fact Piotrus even worked hard and successfully to have Molobo unbanned, e.g.[316]

MY POINT: If Wikipedia is to have Admins who blatantly take sides then we need to impose a system where administrators publicly declare their POV allegiances coupled to a balancing system where different groupings are allocated equal quotas of admin-ships. Or alternatively we could instead choose to strive for at least nominally neutral administrators and weed out the obvious POV pushing Admins and let them contribute as normal editors instead.--Stor stark7 ^Speak 21:54, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Response to Piotrus evidence against Stor stark7

I'm Swedish, but since postwar Germany is one of my specialties I'll let Piotrus labeling me as German slide.

German Tag team Allegation

Piotrus makes the claim of an association between me and Matthead two other active members of this tag team have risen up in his defense How exactly is voicing my concerns about Piotrus behavior "defending Matthead"? It's news to me to hear that I'm an active member in an alleged tag team and I note that Piotrus was unable or unwilling to provide diffs actually showing me to be part of such a team, despite his repeated accusations. Where is the proof? Why does Matthead need defending from Piotrus by the way? Is he part of this arbitration? In fact as far as I know it is exceedingly rare that I even cross paths with Matthead or Sciurinæ. And I do not need to "try to divert the case from Matthead and their own actions", I'm here to draw attention to Piotrus actions nothing else and I presume this is in fact simply an attempt by Piotrus to try to divert attention using words since diffs are non-existent.

Accusation of using old diffs

year+ old diffs: The bulk of the diffs I provided as a sample of Piotrus activities come from the period March - April 2008. No diffs are any older than that.

Accusation of me having POV "ranging from 'Greater Germany' to 'neo-Nazi'"

Since the only example given relates to me - a statistical list of editing topics - and Piotrus previously repeatedly has called me a Nazi I presume the 'Neo-Nazi' bit of the alleged range is meant for labeling me and not Matthead or Sciurinae, except by alleged association to me. This is precisely the type of Piotrus behavior I'm involved in this arbitration because of. Where is the evidence? E.g. editing the article Nazi Germany does not by default make anyone a Neo-Nazi. Piotrus makes complaints about Guilt_by_association, and then uses precisely that tactic. Perhaps Piotrus finds it distasteful that I in my most recent edit of Nazi Germany added the Saar flag, or that I that same day had added a crematorium image? Maybe it was "Nazi" or "Greater Germany" of me to expand the article Disarmed Enemy Forces from a stub last week? I write about notable but relatively unknown topics that few others want to deal with, such as this, which is a thankless job, especially when it leads to this type of vicious personal attacks. I would have though that my response in the the Administrators noticeboard should have been enough indication for Piotrus that I find it highly offensive to be attacked as a Nazi, as any normal wikipedian would. Further I don't not see why Piotrus seems unable to understand this still, since he simultaneously both seemingly apologies and continues with "Neo-Nazi" accusations. In fact I do not see how Piotrus can possibly avoid a block for this latest Nazism accusation.

"My content claims"

If the arbitration committee so wishes I too can address the content claims in more detail, and will provide the book review to any arbitrators unable to access it themselves.

Claim I go looking for places to criticize in

Piotrus claims that (paraphrased) "I chip in with criticism and complaints wherever unrelated issues related to editors I dislike are being discussed". And the evidence provided for this allegation by Piotrus is this?? A completely unrelated restriction notice, based in part on me blowing my lid here? As far as I can tell this completely unrelated issue was brought up just to make me look bad (so he did that wrong, then maybe he did what Piotrus claims too...), either that or when Piotrus realized there was nothing with which to substantiate his allegation with he decided to provide a diff anyway, and that was the worst he could find.

My alleged POV:

According to Piotrus I promote the POV "Germans were victims and Allies were the victimizers" Apparently this is Piotrus "explanation" for his repeated personal attacks on me using the Nazi label. Actually I'm afraid the whole sentence might be a very cleverly disguised attack. A combination between Ad hominem and Straw man 1. Twist things by attributing a certain unsavory POV to me which might make the Nazi attacks seem justified. 2. Vaguely admit the Nazi accusation and admit that it could be seen as offensive.... Mud sticks, as they say, how exactly do you defend yourself against an accusation like that, an accusation without any attempt at evidence presented, without risking the "the lady doth protest too much" syndrome? My editing is straightforward and not hidden under random stuff; anyone can easily check my content edits. My real POV is that there are gaps in Wikipedia on notable topics. One of those topics is crimes against the Japanese for example. I think I can take much credit for this section even coming into existence, but it sure was difficult. One of the supposedly undue topics I've looked at are the German victims. Apparently some would like to claim monopoly on victims, but surprise, there were some German too, e.g.[317]. Another topic I look at is the occupation of Germany, where Piotrus has for example collaborated with Molobo as I pointed out at the Administrators noticeboard. I have nothing to hide nor any offensive POV that in any way could possibly justify Piotrus Nazi accusations. When I'm stuck or don't understand something I ask for reputable help, such as here[318],[319]. I have to give Piotrus a reluctant artistic credit for the very cleverly phrased sentence though. I've added notable content to loads of articles, including the Holocaust article too[320], I wonder if that's also part of the edits that Piotrus claims he finds "highly offensive" POV? Please review my Nazi accusations No.1 point, and check if it in any way could be compatible with Piotrus "explanation" for his Nazi attack against me.

Accusations of Harassment

Piotrus repeatedly claims that he is being harassed by alleged anti Piotrus tag-teams, of which I'm supposed to be part. Piotrus even request that I should be asked by the arbitration committee not to harass other editors. It's impossible to prove non-harassment, how do you produce the diffs? But it is painfully obvious that Piotrus has produced no diffs of any alleged harassment against him, all that's been produced by Piotrus are the endlessly repeated tag and harassment accusations against me i.e. Proof by verbosity.--Stor stark7 ^Speak 01:18, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Undue Weight, misrepresentation allegation etc

Reply to this:

• The Pittsburgh range IP's that reverted me, and indeed also Piotrus, at westerplatte were irrelevant to this arbitration, although it can for forms sake be noted that Piotrus never bothered to undo the IP's repeated blankings.
• Piotrus writes that I misrepresent this as a refusal to discuss.[321]. See also the subsequent discussion.[322] Please judge who misrepresents.
• Piotrus on the other hand misrepresents. It is Piotrus continuing POV that the paragraph at westerplatte is "trivia/undue". The 3rd opinion disagreed with Piotrus, as he well knows. And the following is very indicative of Piotrus lack of self awareness of his POV: "fact promoting the idea that in 1939, Germans had a moral right to invade Poland because Poland might have contemplated invading Germany in 1933". I do not care if this is the way Piotrus actually views the paragraph, or if it is simply defense rhetoric. Either case vividly shows that he should not be allowed to remain as sysop.
• Number of Nazi attacks. Piotrus states - with a smiley - that his 3 uses of Nazi (actually it is 4, against me at least) is a irrelevantly low amount of evidence to present here, especially considering his large body of edits. For me, and others, being accused of being a Nazi is a big deal. I don't follow Piotrus around to see what he calls others, I've presented the cases where I've been personally sorely offended. I'm sorry to see that for Piotrus using the Nazi allegation is not that serious. Do we need admins, people who are supposed to be role-models for the rest of us, with this attitude? --Stor stark7 ^Speak 11:17, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Response to Biophys

In his attempts to defend Piotrus user Biophys has singled out my evidence for a personal attack by Piotrus as "typical 'evidence'", which he then proceeds to attempt to defuse by providing just the primary diff and his own interpretation of that diff. Somehow he manages to ignore that Piotrus already in essence has admitted guilt, see "German tag team" and Biophys also omits all the context diffs for that incident, (as well as the other prior and later events where Piotrus has used "Nazi", including - incredibly enough - in this very Arbitration.) According to Biophys what Piotrus did was simply criticize article content: "let's remove whitewashing of Nazi crimes from this article".

Lets see how Piotrus "removed whitewashing". He added 2 sentences.

• "in light of German rearmament and violations of the Treaty of Versailles"
• "French continued their policy of appeasement".

I had dropped those those sentences while harassed by IP's intent on removing the paragraph. The first sentence adds nothing of value, we already linked to the reason for the proposal: Preventive war, i.e. war now to avoid a seemingly inevitable worse war later. And, more to the point, the "context" provided by Piotrus is misleading since the treaty violations did not really start until 2 years later, i.e. Hitlers future intentions were clear enough visa vi the Free City of Danzig etc, but visible German treaty violations started only in 1935.

The second Piotrus sentence (or rather what he choose to omit from it) on the other hand is actually very interesting: "French continued their policy of appeasement". While technically true, the way the source phrases it is that after French rejection of the proposal the Poles flung themselves into the race for appeasement and just barely won the race ahead of France. To make that Piotrus addition accurate and neutral you would have 2 choices, either mention Polish appeasement together with French - and face hell from IP's (and possibly others) - or simply drop the appeasement topic.

Now what Piotrus actually said about his changes to the paragraph I had restored - Biophys very charitable interpretation aside - was: "neutral version restored, Nazi whitewashing reverted..."[323] See the resemblance to this March 4 statent?"in my experience 99% of edits from this periodically editing account involve whitewashing (or plainly removing) references to Nazi crimes during WWII and unduly highlighting suffering of the German people."[324]

And again, let me point out that the paragraph I wrote that he had very reluctantly agreed upon in March did not contain those two sentences.[325]

Lets look at the March 2008 background to this incident, which happened while I was having continued friction with Piotrus at the Bloody Sunday article:

1. I insert the topic to the article Westerplatte.[326]
2. The sockpuppet Antyfaszysta (talk · contribs) is created, and proceeds to blank my entry[327], although first he blanks my long and well sourced entry at the Bloody_Sunday article using the edit summary "propaganda"[328]
3. A few minutes minutes later Piotrus welcomes this 2-edits "user"[329]
4. 11 minutes after welcoming "him" Piotrus uses the Antyfaszysta version of Bloody Sunday (the "propaganda" summary blanking version) to begin making the article as he prefers[330]
5. Some time later I try to undo the sock puppet damage at Bloody sunday, but get reverted by Piotrus[331]
6. I told Piotrus that he should not have based his edits on the "propaganda" revert of this new account Antyfaszysta (talk · contribs). The response was: "Perhaps."[332]
7. Meanwhile, back at the Westerplate article I had restored the content, only to be reverted by Piotrus with the summary "completely irrelevant"[333]
8. I request that Piotrus take up his issues at talk. This only resulted in a new revert[334]
9. I asked for outside comment (it was moved to 3rd opinion, which I did not know existed)[335]
10. Piotrus finally accepts the inclusion of the text[336]
11. The 3rd opinion agrees, and has some advice for Piotrus.[337]

So, to sum up the response to Biophys, the "nazi whitewashing" was indeed a personal attack, in essence identical to the earlier "whitewashing (or plainly removing) references to Nazi crimes"[338] and the one used in this arbitration "this tag team (which could be variously described as ranging from "Greater Germany" to "neo-Nazi" and it is merely a highlight of a very antagonistic pattern on the part of Piotrus. It is notable that Biophys failed to note this, as well as Piotrus "apology". --Stor stark7 ^Speak 00:27, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Reply to Molobo

I thank Molobo for his estimate of my intelligence, and I reply that I think highly both his and Piotrus intellectual capacity, evidence of which is even shown on Piotrus personal introduction.

As to Molobo; as Piotrus himself at this page has pointed out regarding his longtime associate: "Molobo has a problematic history and was once blocked for a year". He does this while claiming that I try to divert attention by focusing on Molobo. Odd considering that I came here because I am sick of Piotrus clever incivility through his acts, often well covered with apparently civil language.

As to Molobos assertions, whatever Molobos intention was, I believe they simply reflect badly on him. He even goes back to my first week at wikipedia on January 2006.... I believe most of it is covered by the reply I provided to his previous attack. Contrary to Piotrus assertion, I'm not Molobos sparring partner, I'm rather one of his many victims. It should be noted that Piotrus voted to "keep" Molobos article "German collective guilt", an article Molobo had hijacked from my sandbox and thoroughly warped. A quick review of Molobos diffs. Please take the time to review both Molobos spinn about what they contain, and what you find when you actually click on them. The Holocaust should be self-evident. The second statement should be viewed in light of the topic being discussed and this. The third it should be self-evident that I was referring to the Regime then in power and was not allocating collective guilt etc etc, the last statement is based on this (search for "crazy"). I believe Molobo is well aware of all this.

Now, I've come across Molobo and his incarnations very often, especially when he's sought me out on non Poland related topics. Molobo brought up the Morgenthau plan, which by the way was not created by me. Here we find an interesting collaboration between Piotrus and Molobo.[339], despite Molobos edits at that time being challenged at talk by both Colonell mustard and Me. This Molobo - Piotrus collaboration had been going on for several days, e.g. this restoration of a typical Molobo phrase "to repair damage made by Nazi Germany" by Piotrus, see for example here, and here, and during Molobos one year block also seen here, here, here, here, and here. User:Graneth, one of the transients above mentions a DW article about German reparations for 640 billion.here, and so does Molobo here.

Let me note, as also others do, that Piotrus often seems to works very closely with this user with "a problematic history", and I guess it must have been during his failed efforts to pinn a Nazi accusation against me that he found this tidbit to hand Molobo[340]. When Molobo's 1 year block expired Piotrus provided some pretty words[341]. As far as I know he never even once enforced those pretty words up to the time Molobo was permanently banned, and then unbanned thanks to Piotrus effort. I think that unenforced notice is important and symptomatic, Piotrus is very eloquent, but it is his actions we need to examine, not his words.--Stor stark7 ^Speak 00:17, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Evidence presented by Boodlesthecat

"Special case" Boodlesthecat's response to Piotrus

First, let me thank the Academy for this "special case" award. Now, let's explore point by point.

• Piotrus finds mediator Prom3th3an's statement "telling," although he's not telling what he found telling. Others also found Prom3th3an's statement of interest, enough to issue Prom3th3an this unambiguous warning
• My complaint about Piotrus' article defacement by fact tag bombing (sixteen tages!) speaks for itself. This is not the first time Piotrus has defaced an article like this. It wasn't acceptable in the past, and its not acceptable now
• Although this sort of editing tactic might be an improvement from the edit-war-file-a-3RR tactic that Piotrus and his allies used to prefer, which seems to have ceased now that this arb is scrutinizing some of these tactics. Although Tymek seems to have not gotten the email about not using that tactic any more.
• My WP:CIVIL warnings to Tymek are self explanatory. I will take further action if Tymek continues to make false accusations like those I have deatiled on his talk page in the warnings.
• Piotrus claims I have "harassed greg with accusations of antisemitism." Actually, concern about Greg's Jew baiting is becoming a wider community concern. Framing this as me against Greg is transparently false. Note also, for those unaware, Greg's apparent threat of violence against an admin here.
• Piotrus claims "Boody has implied that anybody who defends greg is an antisemite." A) Please show a diff where I made that "implication," or kindly remove that defamatory claim, and B) what I actually have, and continue to imply is that Piotrus explicitly defends Greg--to the point of abusing his admin power and threatening to block me for removing a serious BLP violation by Greg (upheld HERE).
• Piotrus amazingly claims "before Boody, for example, we were somehow able to raise History of the Jews in Poland to a FA status, without any major incivil disputes." I will, as the Bible instructs us, assume good faith and assume Piotrus simply made a big boo boo here with that accusation, rather than proffering a bald faced lie. Check the record, Piotrus. The article failed feature article review on April 25, 2008 (mainly because it had been wrecked by edit warring). Note also that I did not make a single edit to the article until June 18, 2008, (yes, that would be 2 months later) where I made a minor edit that was reverted 3 minutes later (giving me a forewarning of what was to come, although my edit is now upheld, as are about 99.9% of the edits I've made to that article). Piotrus also rather immodestly [took sole credit for the FA] even though it was clearly a collaborative effort by a number of editors at the time).
• Piotrus claims that he tried to "reach out" to me. Actually, his main "reaching out" is illustrative of another tactic of his--trying to play his perceived enemies against each other. Piotrus has tried to solicit my help in his border war with the Lithuanians, although I had to beg off.
• A splendid example of playing perceived enemies off against each other is his contrasting of editor Malik Shabazz' "constructive" style (and I agree with him there) with my supposed disruptions. Let me remind Piotrus of some of Malik's own comments on the modus operandi of Piotrus and his team that Malik posted not long ago here:

  "It takes two to tango, Piotrus. You are just as rigid in your position as Boodlesthecat is, so please don't act as though he's the problem. You and several other editors seem determined to white-wash Polish antisemitism, or to blame it on the Jews, and Boodlesthecat brings quality sources that refute your assertions. You're not an innocent victim here."

I have always respected Malik's judgement, and I am glad that Piotrus does too! Hopefully he will take Malik's words to heart.

• Oh, and yes, I sent an unkind an inexcusable email to Piotrus for which I've apologized on a few occasions rudely accusing him of dikdom (and despite Piortus' comical mention of the "dick" emails, there was only one email anointing thusly and rudely). Others have been kind enough to note, without excusing it, some of my possible reasons for such rudeness.
• Open challenge to Piotrus or anyone else. Show me any improper edits I have made to any of the disputed articles. In attempting to address the "white-wash" that Malik notes above, it has been the case that the vast majority (quite near 100%) of my edits have withstood the attacks of Piotrus and his teammates because they are valid, and have made a modest contribution to improving this project. The challenge is open. Boodlesthecat ^Meow? 19:07, 8 September 2008 (UTC)
  • Update 9/11: Piotrus humorously declares in anguish "Boody just accused me of antisemitism." Anyone who could care is welcome to read my comment here where for the umpteenth time I do indeed implore Piotrus to stop filling this encyclopedia with "outdated, discredited and outright anti-semitic nonsense". Peruse if you care, the last week of of Piotrus' feverish edit warring on Lwów pogrom (1918), as he aggressively attempts to fill that article with examples of the abovementioned "outdated, discredited and outright anti-semitic nonsense", or as Malik accurately describes it above, examples of Pitorus in action once again as he continues to be "determined to white-wash Polish antisemitism, or to blame it on the Jews." I make no apologies for my repeated attempts to educate Piotrus on basic encyclopedic historiography. Boodlesthecat ^Meow? 21:15, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Case study of Piotrus' abuse of admin authority to engage in POV edit warring

Piotrus continues abusing the 3RR report process as a tool for his edit warring, as can seen here. The result; yet another admonishment to Piotrus for his abuse of the 3RR process to carry out edit warring. This particular interaction is emblematic of the sort of POV edit warring Piotrus (and his fellow tag team members) engages in on articles concerning Polish Jewry (the topic in which I have come up against his abuses); namely, attempts to minimize instances of Polish anti-semitism, and to inject a decidedly fringe, and indeed anti-Jewish POV into articles that seek to find ways to blame Jews for pogroms and other abuse committed against them. In this particular instance, I had removed a long-standing anti-semitic canard] from this article, which attempted to justify pogroms with claims (falsely attributed to the Morgenthau commission) by noting (completely without context) that "that Poles also died at the hand of Jews," and falsely claimed that "a significant portion of which (as also supported by Richard C. Lukas) supported the Soviets and formed militias to fight their Polish equivalents and regular army." this is simply an old, anti-semitic canard with no support outside of the fringe (and misquoted) sources used to back it up. Piotrus responded with a revert, claiming "proper corr" (not sure what that means; I again removed the false material, editing it to correspond to the fringe source. Piotrus again reinserted the multiply probelematic wording, with an odd "In detail" edit summary. I removed it again, indicating it did not correspond to the sources, and requested in the summary that Piotrus "take it to TALK and provide quotes supporting and discuss before reverting." Piotrus ignored my request to discuss on talk, and reverted again, this time with an edit summary of "+ref" and adding a ref and quote which (oops) unfortunately referred to the wrong war (Piotrus had dug up a quote referring to the Polish-Ukrainian War rather than the Polish-Soviet War—the subject of the article in question). I reverted yet again, pointing out both the fact that the material still was not in the sources cited, as well as this blooper of an error bringing in a quote from the wrong war, and again requesting that Piotrus discuss his edits on talk and provide documentation there. Piotrus finally began discussion on talk, (although only to disingenuously demand a reason for "removal of refs" rather than to provide the twice requested explanation and quotes supporting his edits) and only after he filed a 3RR report (Piotrus was apparently too busy provoking a revert war and compiling diffs to enage in a discussion of his erronesous and offensive anti-Jewish edits on talk).

As noted in the evidence presented below, not only was Piotrus engaging in an edit war on this article in order compile diffs to file a 3RR while ignoring repeated requests to discuss his extremely problematic edits on talk (this despite clear earlier warnings to Piotrus not to use reverting as an editing technique, he was simultaneously shopping for admins to look at the edits he refused to discuss himself, in the hopes that one such admin might find something amiss and block me (apparently unsuccessfully). This is only the latest of his attempts to forum shop to have me blocked (always without notifying me of the discussions), eg here. It would be worthwhile for this arb to look into just how much on and off Wiki shopping Piotrus has been engaged in in his rather obsessive effort to have me blocked. Boodlesthecat ^Meow? 17:20, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

• I now expect Piotrus will, in retaliation for my posting of this case study, attempt to beef up his portrayal of me as a villain in an attempt to try and do some damage control. this is to be expected, and I have confidence that reviewers here will weigh the evidence objectively. Boodlesthecat ^Meow? 17:56, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
  • And a reality check-- Do I anywhere above claim that Malik agrees with me? No, yet thats the falsehood Piotrus tells Malik while Piotrus pleads with Malik for the second time! to dissociate himself from my comments. Seems like the spin control is spinning out of control. Boodlesthecat ^Meow? 23:10, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Response to deliberately doctored quote presented as "evidence" by Xx236

Now some of Piotrus' defenders are resorting to outright lying. Xx236 claims in his evidence section below that I said ""Some people think all Poles are stupid. But actually thats exaggerated--that perception comes from the fact that a small number of Poles were noticed to be stupid."

This is a completely doctored quote, knowingly and deceptively put into evidence by Xx236 as part of the continued cheap tactics by Piotrus' allies to attempt to vilify their perceived opponents. The actual post I made said

By offering these pseudo explanations, and by peppering our articles with the fringe pseudo scholarly justifications disguised as explanations offered by Piotrowski and Lukas, we are simply giving credence to justifications for simple lies and murder. My examples werent strawmen. By your logic I could add to an article "Some people think all Poles are stupid. But actually thats exaggerated--that perception comes from the fact that a small number of Poles were noticed to be stupid." Or "some people think all Blacks are criminals. But that perception....bla blabla."

If you actually read what I wrote in its context, I am saying that by Piotrus' logic (in which he tries to insert lies about Polish Jews as fact by stating the lie and then claiming it was "exaggerated"), lies about Poles or blacks or any other group can be inserted into articles.

That selective use of my statements was pretty lame and despicable tactic by one of Piotrus' most vocal and aggressive supporters in their team edit warring. Sheesh. Boodlesthecat

Evidence presented by Tiptoety

Piotrus placed on 1RR resrtictions along with Boodlesthecat

While responding to reports at WP:AN3, Piotrus took notice and sent me an email requesting that I review a report that he had filed against Boodlesthecat (talk · contribs). Upon investigation, I found that both users where involved in a content dispute over the removal of material that Boodlesthecat found to be false, and if the report was not stale, I would have blocked both parties for edit warring. Here are a few examples of the reverts: [342], [343], [344]. While investigating the edit warring further (seeing as there was an active Arb case and a rather large history between the two users), Piotrus, in another forum I participate in that is unrelated to Wikipedia, requested/asked/shopped for uninvolved admins to look into the reverts that Boodlesthecat were making, and for them to see if the they were against policy, and if so, would someone block him/her (please note that no one group of admins where approached specifically, just anyone who was willing to listen) . After a discussion, myself and another admin decided it was best to continue our conversation on-wiki in hopes of getting some form of resolution. A thread was started on ANI, where it would later be decided (both parties agreed) that it be best that neither Piotrus or Boodlesthecat are to revert one another more than one time (generally speaking), and that any violation of said restriction would result in a block. Both Piotrus and Boodlesthecat were notified of the restrictions. Tiptoety ^talk 21:03, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Update

Boody has been blocked by East718 (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) for violation of the above sanctions. Tiptoety ^talk 18:47, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Evidence presented by User:Novickas

Incivility, tendentious editing, edit warring, battling, low-level incivility (conduct unbecoming an administrator, aka what Irpen calls ungentlemanly behavior)

Goes to Administrators#Administrator_conduct - higher standards. Edits made by Piotrus:

• "Ethnography in ethnographic Lithuania is as much non-political as socialism in national socialism :> The concept was quite clearly political - although of course it was dressed as a scientific concept to make it look more acceptable; another comparison would be of intelligent design to a scientific theory."[345]

• "I suggest you concentrate on writing content instead of trying to discuss things with editors like M.K." [346].

• "Yes, as the history has shown, Germany and Russia proven to be true great friends of the Lithuanian nation, indeed." [347]

• "As I said, one could also criticize this article for recreating one of the legends of the Patriotic War. I do however note that you have no objections along that line?" [348]

• Unnecessary battle: filing this AFD [349], stating that the entity of Suvalkija was no more than an instance of Lithuanian POV. Skim the article and decide for yourselves if the AFD was warranted, and whether he should have quickly admitted error and backed off.

• Battlegrounds - the number of Arbcoms, admin interventions, page protections, mediations, RFC, the recall requests [350], etc. that he has been involved in speak for themselves.

• Inflammatory rhetoric creates battlegrounds. He alleges "censorship" [351] in an FAC comment and uses "infamous" in article space [352] (The use of infamous is mentioned in Wikipedia:Avoid peacock terms - an experienced editor should be familiar with those.) Used infamous in an article again a few days ago - after this word was brought to his attention - [353] (his edit summary was "c/e, corrs, +refs, etc.") - along with censor in talk space [354]. Novickas (talk) 04:24, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

• According to P., "...Alfred E. Senn explicitly noted that Lithuania has violated its neutrality towards Poland so far that Poland would have been quite justified in declaring war against Lithuania at that time".[355] Well, historians don't generally make statements to the effect that war would have been justifiable; and in this case Senn did not. (What he did say)

• Tendentious editing: adding "page number" request tags to citations that included Google Print URLs:[356][357][358]

• Failure to observe some basic and long-standing policies. Edit summaries: he summarized this major edit as "c/e, corrs, +refs, etc" [359]. The policy: "Proper use of edit summaries is critical to resolving content disputes. Edit summaries should accurately and succinctly summarize the nature of the edit, especially if it could be controversial." He inserts and then re-inserts ethnicity into a lead paragraph [360], [361] with the edit summary "Please no disambigs and what MOS?" [362]. Novickas (talk) 17:39, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

• Battling in the light of policy comprehension. Article tags are meant to further article talk page discussion. In these examples Piotrus, without engaging in discussion, proposed moving the concerns to the level of rename or delete.
  • MK restored a naming dispute tag [363], followed immediately by Piotrus' "then do a WP:RM instead of tagging the article".[364] I posted referenced findings at talk and then asked "Could we discuss why we should not change this article's name, given the prevailing EN-language usage demonstrated above?". Piotrus replied "Feel free to start a WP:RM to fully gauge the consensus of the community". [365].
  • Here Irpen inserts a proposed deletion tag [366]. Piotrus removes the tag [367] with the edit summary "seems notable to me - an academic - use AfD if you disagree". I reinsert it, since WP:PROD clearly states that the PROD tag calls for talk page or edit summary discussion. Piotrus' reply is "Please present those arguments at WP:AFD if you feel so strongly about this article".[368]

Comments on Piotrus' behavior made by other admins

No retractions, apologies, self-trout-slaps, or other such acknowledgments are visible here:

• "Problematic behavior" re sourcing. User:Angusmclellan at [369]

• "I "endorse censorship and personal attacks"? Seriously? This is how you work with other administrators?". User:Gamaliel at [370]

• "Since Piotrus has a number of IRC and IM "admirers", happy to blindly revert to Piotrus's versions I doubt that it (i.e.1 RR) would work." User:Alex Bakharev at [371]

• "I think that Piotrus fails to see that it takes two to edit war." User:Tiptoety at [372]

• "Unfortunately the nom lacks self-awareness about his own weaknesses and areas of bias. He is slow to understand when he has made an error. And reluctant to let bygones be bygones in order to settle a dispute. This is especially an issue because he is quick to see and point out faults in others." User:FloNight at [373]

• "Piotrus, I'll add that removing somebody's good-faith edit with "totally irrelevant" does not demonstrate the consideration due your fellow editors." User:William Pietri at [374]

• "Hi Piotrus, just a friendly reminder that the 3RR is not entitlement to revert three times each day, nor does it endorse reverting as an editing technique." User:ChrisO at [375]

• "This is a bit rich, Piotrus. To begin with, there's nothing wrong with citing Jan T. Gross, the Norman B. Tomlinson '16 and '48 Professor of War and Society and Professor of History at Princeton University. More to the point though, Boodlesthecat wasn't quoting Gross, despite persistent claims by you and others that he was." User:Jayjg at [376]

• "Yes, Piotrus contacted me and told me that he was too experienced for the 3RR rules to apply to him and that he had managed to convince an admin to unblock him at IRC, and then lectured me on the risk of being de-admined and told me that I was lucky he had woken up in good mood." User:TigerShark at [377]

• "Piotrus I feel did act improperly, but this should have been caught. Visiting IRC to ask for an unblock is fine, as would emailing unblock-l be. But his descriptions of why are grossly inaccurate, his statement that he should have different treatment from the norm when in fact he has breached a more demanding standard as an admin is slightly shocking, and his description of his opponents is questionable, and in fact has now been looked at by two checkusers who feel it is not by any means evident." User:FT2 at [378]

• "You(r) condescending attitude toward a fellow admin, Tigershark, is noted." User:LessHeard vanU at [379]

• "I'm going to second that comment, that an administrator and an experienced user cannot play nice long enough for Arbcom to review their behavior is profoundly disappointing. Maybe 0RR or a temporary topic ban on both, pending the resolution at RFAR is needed." User:MBisanz at [380]

• Last but not least, the comment by JPGordon when restoring very well-sourced material that P. had deleted: "If it's out of place, move it; if it requires balance, balance it", which calmed the situation at the page. [381] And that successful action exemplifies a problem. I honestly think that if an editor had said and done that, it would not have stopped the edit wars. But you see, Piotrus left JP's change alone; the material is still there. It looks as though it takes an Arb committee member to successfully intervene in disputes with Piotrus. That's why I'm limiting this section to comments from admins, although all serious editors using reliable sources deserve the same respect. So, if This August Body is not going to deploy a big trout, then how about a dedicated ombudsperson from its ranks to help in the future? Novickas (talk) 02:36, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Piotrus has not taken the initiative in publicly attempting to moderate the behavior of disruptive editors who edit in the same areas

• Until after they have already been formally admonished by other admins or blocked. [382], [383]. Novickas (talk) 18:12, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Evidence presented by Irpen

Update: While this case was undergoing, Piotrus and myself had a detailed discussion where we again tried to find a solution to the problems related to this case. Unfortunately we did not come to an agreement. Still, some may be interested to read the discussion. --Irpen 02:55, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

---

Please see this section at the Wikipedia talk:Requests for arbitration/Piotrus 2/Evidence for some early responses.

---

Past experience, and the developments in this case so far, suggest that a case where the ArbCom is requested to make a ruling on a WP:BATTLE issue, which is very narrow in scope and limited in extent, is going to become (or may already be) a free-for-all mudbath. This narrow finding, that persons who use articles to engage in political battling, now stands as a truncheon with which warriors beat one another. It has become, instead of the resolution of a case, the instrument of wiki-war.

Experienced combatants know that the surest way to derail any arbcom case (or even an ANI discussion) is to be on a permanent rampage of changing and expand the scope. Many cases have already been derailed this way, sometimes by Piotrus himself [384] , by bringing unrelated grievances against his perceived enemies to any case where their names are mentioned. On the one hand, this is a form of stalking (following a person around, from conflict to conflict, to try to hammer at old (resolved) grievances), and, on the other, it is tendentious editing (using edits for the primary purpose of creating conflict). He already started posting evidence on everyone except his "comrades in arms" in this very case, and others have joined in waving dirty laundry. I may also address this later but, at least for now, I will try to stick with the main issues at hand, which is the charge that most of Piotrus' Wikipedia editing is a violation of WP:BATTLE and disruption disguised as "content" and an apple-polishing veneration of "civility."

• The easiest way to see Piotrus's motives and means is to check his own black book. Examine these diffs and who they target. Try to understand why he is collecting them?
• Ask, also, why he was collecting since March 2007?
• Piotrus has been asked about these collections and, I feel, dissembled. I say this because the purpose can be inferred from:
  • the timing of his black book edits (how it was started in March, 2007, [385] while no arbcom was under way, purportedly shut down [386] (when it came to light in the previous arbcom [387] ), while in fact surreptitiously restarted [388] and maintained throughout these months [389])
  • the spin he gives to each diff [390] compared to what actually happened. Each summary is jaundiced, at the least, and looks to be prosecution, judgment, and execution of enemies.

Black Book

Piotrus black book is clearly malicious

Piotrus claims he was "collecting evidence". The logical questions are, "Evidence of what? For what venue? For what time?" He claimed earlier that he started it for his defense. Were he to have been "prosecuted" at the time, we could have talked about some sort of "defense", but, first, he started logging in March 2007 [391] while no ArbCom case was being heard or even in sight. More importantly, it is difficult to see what defense of his own violations, real of alleged, can be derived from his logging of alleged violations of others. This can be a "defense" only if two wrongs make a right, if impugning those he has harmed and warred with can excuse his actions.

As a defense, the log is useless. As subterfuge or confusion, it's possibly useful, but where it is absolutely best used is as a form of attack. It is my belief that the sole purpose of his log was to oust or sanction his content opponents as, no less importantly, every single subject of Piotrus's black book, Dr Dan, M.K., Lokyz, Matthead, Ghirla, myself, M0RD00R, are or were his content opponents at some point of time (although a single point of diversity coming from his adding Giano to hit-list [392] is a curiosity). If the list were designed to help prevent abuse, then one wonders why none of Piotrus's colleagues in content POV, many of whom are editors with a rather poor record (Molobo and a multisock master who we now know as Alden Jones), made it to his list of violators whose actions needed recording.

Sin diary vs list of failed attempts of conflict resolution

Even if we accept Piotrus's explanations and read them as charitably as possible, this sin diary is a very bad sign. Policy violations, real or alleged, and conflicts should be dealt with as they happen and through the accepted channels of Wikipedia's dispute resolution system. One way to deal with a problematic incident is to let it go. Another option is making an attempt to address the problem once there is one. It would be ideal to record the problem along with the attempts at resolution and the outcome, for this can help create peace. However, if no attempt to resolve the problematic incident was tried, recording the alleged misbehavior for the future use is simply vindictive. Even worse is stalking opponents all over Wikipedia and recording their alleged violations in disputes completely unrelated to you (as Piotrus has done for example here or here). Such activity is nothing but the viciousness of a grand scale. A list of the "greatest hits" of opponents over years is not only meaningless, but it is useful mainly to mislead, misdirect, and continue "war by other means": it can make anyone look either saint or Satan. Such an involuntary sin diary can have no other purpose than ejection of opponents.

Piotrus black book is an irrefutable proof that he sees editing Wikipedia as WP:BATTLE, and this attitude, combined with several incidents of his uploading of his log to Wikipedia at opportune times (example 1 [393] [394]; example 2 [395] [396], example 3 [397] [398], and so on) is sanctionable as a form of longstanding, slow-motion, edit warring and disruption. The very moment he claimed to have stopped [399], he restarted this repugnant activity [400] and continued it on a different pl-wiki page [401], but to the detriment of en.Wikipedia's editing climate.

My pleadings to Piotrus to stop

I made it clear to Piotrus many times that I see his maintaining such a log on myself and others a major detriment to our being able to edit harmoniously [402] [403] [404]. I asked [405], begged [406] him to stop to no avail (actually, my pleading was also added to the black book [407]). Piotrus saw my attempt at dispute resolution as a crime against him worthy of recording in his testament of slights.

Now, it is absolutely clear from his persistence, that this activity will continue unless Piotrus is banned from editing (and this is not a solution anyone requests), because the ban on logging would be impossible to enforce. But the outcome of this case must produce a clear verdict on this activity, whether it is considered to be commendable and ethical or vicious and vindictive. In the latter case, Piotrus' ability to lodge further complaints should be restricted.

Diffs themselves

Now, let's look at his diffs by comparing what actually happened with the spin he gives to the event. I take no pleasure in parsing Piotrus' line of thought, so to save myself and the readers' time I will analyze the stack he had on myself (simply because I can easily remember what actually happened around each of these diffs) as well as those selected entries on others that I can easily recall without much digging:

My dispute with Balcer

The first set of diffs Piotrus managed to compile on myself was unloaded by him into a different Arbcom to which Piotrus had no relation [408] (a sign of times, as I said earlier.) Piotrus attempted to prove my misbehavior towards Balcer. I reviewed those diffs in every minute detail here and many uninvolved editors of the highest standing commented on the merits of these accusations [409] [410] [411] [412] [413].

I had a huge respect and even admiration of Balcer before that sad incident. In fact, I once told Piotrus that my regard towards Balcer was so high that I considered Balcer "the best Wikipedian who edits Polish topics". All the more I was taken aback by how Balcer acted towards me at that particular discussion. We had a disagreement about a particular source, an 86-volume encyclopedia (see from here to the bottom of this page) and Balcer made a veiled accusation that my usage of this source may be suggesting no less than a sympathetic attitude toward the antisemitic views that prevailed in the Imperial Russia. His direct quote was: "Is there something about the POV prevalent in 19th century Russia that is particularly to your taste?" If there is a way to offend me, THIS works and I stated plainly that is too low of him, way lower than I expected, especially, since it was not the first incident of him pulling such stuff on me. While I would react the same way to anyone accusing me of xenophobic views, I said multiple times that I miss editing with Balcer (one example).

Piotrus was clearly stalking in search of material

Piotrus' running around with accusation of myself in connection with the Balcer issue has been tried and commented upon (see above) but other diffs he accumulated are noteworthy as they demonstrate what his goals were, especially if his diffs are analyzed as a combination of what actually happened, the context of what happened, the spin Piotrus gives and (sometimes) the obvious way how he finds them.

Perhaps these are especially revealing:

• "conflicts are not limited to Polish editors only"
• "Irpen's incivility comes up at ANI in an event unrelated to Polish editors".

Both diffs have no relation to Piotrus or any pages of his concern whatsoever and their presence in his log proves beyond reasonable doubt that Piotrus was following me all around Wikipedia in search of material.

In the first diff Piotrus tries to spin an incident when I reprimanded Betacommand [414] for trolling at my talk page. Betacommand first posted a vandalism warning template at my talk [415], then repeated his vandalism accusation [416] and, after I removed that nonsense [417], revert warred with me on my own talk page [418]. So, in this Piotrus finds proof that "conflicts are not limited to Polish editors only". How did he find my entry at Betacommand's talk? The answer is obvious.

The second time Piotrus logs that my "incivility comes up at ANI in an event unrelated to Polish editors" does not really require any explanation beyond reading the ANI thread noting the names of Irpen-bashers (Dorftrottel and Sceptre) and wondering why it is relevant for Piotrus to log.

This note in the black book is curious too for it records the time I was not editing at all!:

• Irpen: "December 28-Feb 8: inactive"

And inactive I was indeed [419] as I seriously pondered leaving the Wikipedia until some unexpected events made me change my mind [420]. Now, please, anyone, add all the good faith in the world you are willing to assume! And after you have done that, explain this "diff" being logged by Piotrus in a good way!

The other three diffs Piotrus added to his log in the same edit are these: [421], [422] and [423]. The context was Piotrus' taking turns with Molobo (to stay under 3RR) repeatedly removing well-sourced material from History of Poland (1939-1945). I invite anyone to check these diffs Piotrus considered logworthy for whatever reason and decide for themselves.

Dishonest editing

Piotrus invokes his content creation as his main defense. It seems so convincing that even I was charmed for a while. You need to edit with Piotrus for years (like myself) or be a specialist in the field of one of his articles (like Deacon with respect to the history of Medieval Rus) to realize the true picture.

By its very design the Wikipedia is written largely by amateurs. We should strive to make at least our FA assessment process scholarly but the rare serious scholars who try to take part in our project are often driven off in the climate conducive of ignorant editing, POV pushing by users for who advancement of their political views is the main motivation of editing and with the resolution process being skewed by career mandarinship and wikilawyering.

So, the assessment, both of content and of editors, remains poor and random. Article's "appearance" and compliance with MoS play an undue role while the quaility of references, the propriety of their use, and whether the article actually reflects its supposed references plays little role. Who has time to verify these references anyway?

Many of Piotrus' references are googled or google-booked quotes from sources that he obviously have not read in full but rather found searching for a particular string . Guess what content can you write if your main source of references comes from running strings like "Jewish Soviet collaboration" or "Lithuanian Nazi collaboration" in Google Books or Google Scholar? At the same time the classical and most cited in the scholarly field works are often pushed aside in favor of much lesser quality sources and web-sites. As a result Piotrus' articles reflect the fundamental difference between the writings based on the fully read books and tendentious writing based on the cherry-picked googled quotes stacked together to promote one POV. In this quest, the sources are often misrepresented and even outright falsified. Often, when the quality sources contradict the tendentious POV, they are attacked with the persistent vigor.

Falsification, misrepresentation and skewing of sources, copyvios, etc.

Adding content sourced to truly horrible (or even non-existing) sources and/or copyvio edits

• Example 1. Lifting content from a horrible blog and adding it to an article.
  • The first time my alarm rang when I noticed that Piotrus lifted the horrible content (terribly POVed) from a low quality web-site and inserted it without attribution directly into a Wikipedia article [424]. This was both a copyvio and using an extremely poor source. See this discussion and note a terrible amount of good faith I was willing to assume back then.
• Example 2. Fictitious book presented as a source of content
  • At about the same time Piotrus added a fictitious book that was never published as a reference to his content [425]. Piotrus could not have ever seen that book because is simply never existed. This book remained in the article for several years until caught and removed by Novickas last September. See this discussion for details.
• Example 3. Anonymous talk page entry as a source for an article
  • Here, Piotrus adds to an article on the Polish philosopher, who happens to author a work called "Judaized Hitlerism" (!), a claim that the article's subject was a "fighter against racist myths". The source of Piotrus' edit is a talk page entry from an anonymous IP. See the talk page discussion for more on that.
• Example 4. Copyvio lifting text from Britannica:
  • Here [426] [427] I corrected what I found to be both a copyvio from Britannica and a misquotation by Piotrus when he lifted [428] content verbatim from Britannica (a grave copyvio).
    • Text from EB (starting from here):
      • The First Partition occurred after Russia became involved in a war against the Ottoman Turks (1768)
        and won such impressive victories, particularly in the Danubian principalities,
        that Austria became alarmed and threatened to enter the war against Russia.
        Frederick II the Great of Prussia, however, in order to avoid an escalation of the Russo-Turkish War, determined to calm
        Austro-Russian relations by shifting the direction of Russia's expansion from the Turkish provinces to Poland.
    • Text of Piotrus' edit [429]
      • The First Partition occurred after the balance of power in Europe shifted, with Russian victories against
        the Ottomans in the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774) strengthening Russia so
        that Austria became alarmed and threatened to enter the war against Russia.
        Frederick II the Great of Prussia, wanting to avoid an escalation of conflict, and trying to maximize Prussia's gains, succeeded in reducing the tension of
        Austro-Russian relations by shifting the direction of Russia's expansion from the Turkish provinces to Poland.

Adding content that is contrary to the citations used as its reference

• Example 1. Poles died in the hands of Jews.
  • Here, Piotrus adds a claim that is contrary to what the reference says. Piotrus addition says: "the excesses were of political rather than anti-Semitic nature and that the term "pogrom" was inapplicable to the conditions existing within a war zone, particularly as Poles also died at the hand of Jews, significant portion of which supported the Soviets and formed militias to fight their Polish equivalents and regular army".
  • What the reference in fact says is exactly the opposite: "These excesses were, therefore, political as well as anti-Semitic in character" [430] See this discussion at talk.
• Example 2. This September Piotrus tries to insert the very same "Poled died in the hands of Jews" stuff into a totally different article and runs a fierce revert war to persist with this claim [431] [432] [433]
• Example 3. Jews provoking antisemitism by their sympathies to communist causes
  • Here Piotrus inserts a statement into History of Jews in Poland claiming that "Significant percentage of Jews [in 1930s Poland] were sympathetic to the communist cause; that led to growing tensions betweem Polish and Jewish communities in those regions." He references this famous antisemitic claim to this reference.
  • The reference in fact states to the contrary: "Most of the Polish Jews, except for a small group of Communist sympathizers, were afraid of the Soviet Union and Communism. Before their eyes were still the fresh memories of the Polish-soviet Russian War of 1920. In addition, most Polish Jews were occupied in trade. Jewish workers, in general, were very few."

Page moves

Many editors had some heated discussions with Piotrus regarding the articles' names. There is nothing wrong in that per se. But Piotrus, when he is uncertain that his preferred name for the article can meet a consensus, frequently uses the, so called, AndriyK's move trick that consists in the page move being followed by the immediate salting of the redirect through making an edit to the redirect page. This creates a history for the page that prevents the article from being moved back over a redirect.

I noticed him implementing this trick during the rather hot debate about the name of the Partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth article. But it is easy to see that during the last 12 months alone he employed the AndriyK trick at least 15 times. The footprints can be seen in the histories of the following redirects:

1. Christopher Radvila
2. Christopher Radvila "the Lightning"
3. Louise Caroline Radvila
4. Janus Radvila
5. Janus Radvila of Dubingiai and Slutsk
6. Mestwin I of Pomerania
7. Teutonic Takeover of Danzig
8. List of burgomasters of Danzig
9. Partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
10. Allenstein and Marienwerder plebiscite
11. Duchy of Auschwitz
12. History of Gdańsk (Danzig)
13. History of Gdańsk-Danzig
14. Battle of Annaberg, also see [434]
15. Solidarity

Note that when Piotrus is not afraid of any objections to his redirect, he does not bother to edit it. See eg. history of the "Battle of Cudnów" redirect. All redirects Piotrus salted are redirects from the non-Polish titles to the articles he moved to the Polish titles. Many of these titles are part of the old Gdansk/Danzig issue. Other are also titles where the Polishness of the article's name may be disputed. Piotrus did not see any need to salt redirects that resulted from the article being moved away from the Polish titles.

Delving into BLP territory in a quest to miscast sources

While unfair attacks on scholars aimed at striking down their works from being used in Wikipedia may seem as just another method of gaming the sources, and such generally dishonest editing is addressed in the dishonest editing section above, the sensitivity and the utmost importance of the BLP policy warrants to put one kind of such attacks into a separate section. Aside from a common and widespread Wikipedia practice of criticizing the sources at the article's talk page, Piotrus also employs a method that is particularly devious (and dangerous) as it involves poisoning directly the articles devoted to the scholars whose works Piotrus wants to discredit.

Take, for example, Piotrus' activity related to Mikhail Meltyukhov. Meltyukhov is a modern Russian mainstream scholar whose works are frequently and respectfully cited by major English authors (see discussion.) However, this respectable historian had bad luck of falling on Piotrus' bad side for authoring a book about Russo-Polish relations between the World Wars titled "Soviet-Polish Wars. Military and Political Standoff of 1918-1939". While Piotrus bashed Meltyukhov at the talk pages of several articles, just today Piotrus calls his work "extremist" [435], Piotrus goes one step further and makes a long term effort to poison Wikipedia articles related to Meltyukhov. His motivation is revealed by Piotrus' own talk page explanation that goal of his edits are not to make an article about a living person as objective as possible but "to help ensure that people will be less likely to use [his] extremist works as a source. In a different post Piotrus says: "The current section is too long, I agree, but was necessary to ensure that MM would not be cited as a neutral, mainstream source for P-R relations"

Looking at Piotrus′ contributions to the Wikipedia articles related to Meltyukhov reveals the following:

• Here Piotrus adds to an article about the author's book a statement that Meltyukhov's book was praised by a "Holocaust Denial organization".
  • Note that Meltyukhov never worked or published on the Holocaust related topics and if he wrote anything at all about the fate of the Jews, it was exposing the anti-Jewish violence in Ukraine and Belarus during the post-WWI conflicts. The book itself "reviewed" by an HD organization is about the Soviet preparations to the war with Nazi Germany and is completely unrelated to the Holocaust. Thus, both the antisemitic views of the organization and (especially because of such views) its entire review are totally irrelevant to the matter at hand as authors cannot help who and how review their books.
  • Also note, details here, that this very book is cited by such authors like David Glantz, Albert L. Weeks, Ian Kershaw, Moshe Lewin, , etc., who all consider it unquestionably valuable.
• Here [436] [437] Piotrus more than doubles the size of Mikhail Meltyukhov bio article by adding extensive and derogatory criticism of Meltyukhov's work from a certain obscure review. Piotrus then wages a revert war to keep this derogatory information in an article [438] [439] [440]
  • On October 8, I attempted to clean it up [441] and remind Piotrus of BLP [442]. In response, Piotrus resorts to a revert war, again, aimed at restoring the BLP-violating version [443] [444] and bashes the scholar further at the talk page [445] revealing his motivation to edit this article being not to be an objective outline of the person's biography but to "help ensure that people will be less likely to use extremist works as a source."
    • Update: not willing to revert war I tagged an article to draw to it some attention from editors specializing in BLP issues. Piotrus, however, engages into a repeated removal of the tag [446] [447] [448] [449] [450] while taking no effort to address my objections or even respond to them at talk.
  • Also, Piotrus tries to wage an additional attack on Meltyukhov by creating a new Wikipedia article on a person who happens to be a Meltyukhov's critic [451] to somehow "validate" the criticism from the author who has not published anything else on topic despite the article suffers from clear notability problems [452] [453] [454] [455] .

"Luckily" for Meltyukov, he has only two Wikipedia articles related to him, an article on his bio and an article on one of his books. But still, Piotrus made countless disparaging remarks about the author at various talk pages (can be found by quick-scanning of these links.)

Another example of a living author whose Wikipedia coverage suffered from similar tactics by Piotrus is Jan T. Gross, a highly acclaimed Princeton professor of history and an author of multiple academic works.

• Here [456] [457] Piotrus repeatedly poisons the lead of the Gross' article by adding an undue claim (having one of his books viewed "controversial in Poland" is hardly important enough to warrant this being the very second sentence in the article about a person of Gross' standing.)
• Here [458] [459] [460] Piotrus repeatedly adds to an article a bunch of geocities links to yet another "reviewer" of Gross who accuses him of "whitewashing the behavior of the Jews" (!!!) among many other things.
  • The standing of this "reviewer" adds an additional twist to this story. Precisely because of BLP, I would refrain from creating an article on this fringe author. As explained above, Piotrus often looks for skewed sources through cleverly crafting google strings. Writing an article on this basher of Gross sourced to whatever is found by a crafty google string (like this) would mirror Piotrus tactics on editing articles on living authors. For example, this source would come among the top links in google. I would certainly avoid adding the description of Nowak given in this source to the Nowak's article (and would refrain from even creating an article on this marginally notable person.)

The attacks on these authors are by no means exceptional. Among other victims of Piotrus tactics were Lithuanian authors such as Arūnas Bubnys and Kazimieras Garšva. Lithuanian editors can find the specific diffs on those easier than me (also, I remember admin DGG was involved in cleaning up the Garšva article from BLP violations) but, as before, the motivation of such activity is seen from yet another talk page entry by Piotrus himself. As usual, the entry contains two crafty google strings [461] [462] he used to fish for the info and an assertion the "Lithuanian sources may be too interested in whitewashing the issue" of the Holocaust in Lithuania.

To this I need to add, in case some might try the new twist, that personally I have no tolerance of whitewashing of the Holocaust whatsoever and having seen the work by this Lithuanian scholar "The Holocaust in Lithuania" I find no whitewashing there of any sort.

Improper use of off-wiki channels

Abuse of #admins access to advance his POV agenda

Piotrus did not feel a need for #admins until the previous arbcom case, to which I had nothing to do, was filed against him. The case was filed on April 20th, 2007 [463]. On April 21st I posted a statement where I actually expressed my doubts about that being an ArbCom matter [464] since Piotrus' Black Book, which was a breaking point for me, was only discovered two months later [465]. However, on April 26, 2007 Piotrus joined #admins to "get help" for his arbcom [466] and help sure came in the form of David Gerard arriving from the channel completely out of the blue with an uninformed comment based on a diff that Piotrus fed to him. This caused much bemusement from many editors [467]. Speaking of taking this personal, I was not a filing pary of this ArbCom, commented expressing my doubts about the acceptance of the case, but Piotrus saw a need to discuss me of all others at #admins at the time.

Another known example of the channel misuse by Piotrus in his WP:BATTLE against his content opponents took place in March, 2008. It is well documented here. Piotrus, who paints himself as a the utmost civility vigilant, convinced another admin to give him a hand from a clear 3RR block Piotrus got for revert warring by madmouthing his opponents, M.K. and Lokyz, behind their backs in the forum (#admins) to which he knew they have no access.

Two incidents are fairly recent and both concern his feud with Boodlesthecat. As recently as this September Piotrus went to #admins to shop for a friendly closure of a 3RR report he filed against Boodlesthecat against who Piotrus was revert warring rabidly on a number of pages. In that discussion Piotrus tries to say anything he can to make sure Boodlesthecat ends up being blocked that includes making several false assertions (including calling Boodlesthecat's edits "vandalism") since the audience on the channel on that particular night seemed less receptive than Piotrus expected. Details that became fully public can be found here and above but I am sure anyone interested, including arbcom, can see a full log of that discussion at #admins during the late hours (GMT) of September 11, 2008. It was a very quiet night at the channel, so it won't be difficult to find relevant exchanges.

The second similar incident took place this month (October, 2008) and, amazingly, after the previous incident was already publicized and discussed at this ArbCom. Piotrus (who along with Boodlesthecat is on a 1RR restriction) went to #admins IRC again to seek a desirable closure of his WP:AN complaint against Boodlesthecat. Full details can be seen in the log of #admins during the early AM hours of October 5.

These are just some examples, not at all an exclusive list.

Sophisticated incivility

Piotrus presents himself as a civility vigilant. There is no doubt that a reasonable level of civility is crucial for the well-being of this project. However, the worshipping of civility in itself is something else, it is not unique to Piotrus and this concept was sufficiently discussed in the project space to save space for this ArbCom. Not unlike some (though not all) other civility vigilants, Piotrus' own approach to civility is peculiar. He is eager to use WP:CIV as a weapon but his own incivility is much more devious that occasional slips of the tongues found among some of his opinionated opponents. Piotrus does not use bad words but resorts to an incivility in a much more sophisticated forms of goading, taunting and baiting of his "enemies".

• Novickas gives some examples in her evidence section
• More examples in this statement originally made to a case.

More of such are plenty. I will give only those whose time and place I can remember from the top of my head to save time and space. If requested, I can easily bring in any number more of the same:

• Here Piotrus comes to the Russia portal "begging to disagree" that " Russians do not have much of this rancorous, vindictive habit to accuse everyone of long past misdeeds against Russians." No one took the bait to engage with such offensive nonsense and I asked Piotrus to stop attempting to inflame the board with such offenses directed to the entire nation. Piotrus' response is peculiar. He adds my demand to him to quit as an evidence of my 'assuming bad faith, accusing other editors of "inflaming a board"' to his black book for the future use.
• Here Piotrus goes as far as accusing me of "feeling Polonophobic". He knows perfectly well from our past discussions not only that I consider any sort of hate views repugnant but also that I view such accusations as the worst offense.
• When I cast a very civil and well-reasoned oppose [468] to one of his pet article's he nominated for FA, he answers [469] that he expected that "some will be trying to create a bias in the article, and when fail, vote oppose" and sarcastically expresses the "hope" that my vote is "not influenced by our personal disagreements" (and as usually refers to the Digwuren case which he cited to miscast me on every occasion at least 20 times in the last year.) After I refuse to engage and take a bait [470] he "thanks" me [471] for "constructive constructive contribution" in the form of "voting and refusing to discuss my vote". As I elaborate [472] that what I refuse to discuss is not my vote but his his miscasting it, Piotrus silently adds a diff to his black book [473] with a note 'replying to Piotrus "I am not taking the bait"' that supposedly shows my wrongdoing for future use.
  • It is worthwhile to take a look at that FAC nomination which ultimately failed, to see how Piotrus insulted many other opponents in a similarly "civil" and sophisticated fashion
• Here Piotrus makes a completely uncalled for post at my talk "thanking" me for my "bad edits" that prompted him to spend so much time on a particular article. His wish to "Keep it up and I am sure we will see it on FAC in the near future :)" is very civil without doubt. When I calmly respond that this post is just "one step too far" and that he "used to avoid needlessly inflaming matters which this post is nothing but" Piotrus continues his offensive taunting claiming that there was no sarcasm and he finds my actions to "motivate him to work harder on Wikipedia" and that he is "thanking me again for that". I responded that I won't feed him anymore but apparently Piotrus feels he has not taunted me enough yet. He comes back and accuses me of bad faith edits aimed at "disrupting an article pushing my POV" and this is always "feeding" him to spend more time on that. Only when I say that any of his further such entries that are nothing but banal harassment will be simply removed, he stops.
• Here as late as this month Piotrus tries the exact same style of goading at Boodlesthecat's talk

As I said above, these are typical examples and many more of the same can be presented as every editor who had bad luck to disagree with Piotrus saw this type of comments directed at him.

Biophys: enough is enough

To avoid the infinite expansion of the case I refrained from posting separate evidence on other participants regardless of their behavior (including at this very ArbCom) tolerating Biophys' egregious conduct in relation to this arbitration with all patience I could mount. But this and this kind of made the cup of my patience run over and I feel Biophys' conduct at the pages of this case needs to be addressed.

Biophys contributed more than anyone into turning this ArbCom case into an unreadable mess. His edits to this page is a permanent rampage of throwing outrageously odd stuff around, followed by changing evidence all the time, moving parts of it around, removing, readding, etc. Not only this makes it impossible to respond. An amount of noise at the evidence page just makes it useless. His posts at the workshop, evidence' and workshop's talk pages are even more erratic. But what is worst, is that despite being warned many times, he continues, directly or in a veiled form, allege that his perceived enemies are fulfilling a conspiracy plot being conducted by the security services of the Russian Federation (agencies descendant of the KGB itself.) Sometimes, his posts with such clear allegations end up with "disclaimers" that he is not alleging anything specific, just sharing his observations, but such safety disclaimers don't change the overall picture.

According to Biophys such plot, of which I am a leader, is a "two point plan". Plan A is to fill the Wikipedia with propaganda applying various shrewd techniques (5 rules) to make sure it works. If Plan A fails, my Plan B is to destroy the Wikipedia by... promoting Giano's candidacy to ArbCom (!) [474]. How do I do it? By bribing Jimbo with a bottle of brandy so that he appoints Giano [475]. Biophys has been talking nonsense on many occasions for a long time but there must be a limit to how much outright crankery is going to be tolerated at this ArbCom.

Aside from this "disclaimer", much of the rest of his evidence at this very page [476] [477] [478] [479] are equally outrageous. Especially the last two.

Biophys starts with me even in his #Protecting Vladimir Putin section (I made a total of 5 edits out of 6K+ edits to the Putin article with the last one being 2 years ago) where he accuses me of no less than harassing (!) him for telling him [480] that using the Wikipedia talk pages to call one of the most public figures in the world a "paedophile" [481] is completely outrageous. And this "harassment" of Biophys by me actually took place when I was trying, in fact, to sincerely help him in an unfortunate situation when Biophys, exercising an extremely poor judgment, revealed his real life identity quite openly (to protect his privacy I am not going to go to any details here) and then seemed to have regretted that. Seeing him justifiably worried and regretting his mistake, I, in fact, gave him the best possible advise on the damage control that could have been possibly given to him [482]. And now he spins that as "harassment"? This is inexplicable!

His #Team strikes back section is totally insane. Item 5 in this section accuses me of setting a moustrap to him by suggesting how to protect his privacy. For a while I was still trying to respond sensibly [483] [484] but I have given up.

Here Alex posts a response to Biophys and Biophys responds with new diatribes (reading the linked discussion is a little difficult as it became threaded and some entries are unsigned.)

Here another user (Alaexis) responds to this wild stuff. See also this thread and Biophys' intrusion into it.

His edits to the evidence page are erratic, full of nonsense, always changed, removed, readded, moved around, I cannot even respond to them: "leader of the team" is me; "NPOVing". This stuff is just impossible to analyze coherently.

Same goes with his workshop posts. Some of his workshop posts:

• "There are also some other questionable activities, perhaps to suppress free expression of views about this case"
• "WP becomes a dangerous place where people can not freely discuss anything"
• Vicious attack and note my conciliatory response [485]. He then "moderates" himself by changing a post to which I already replied [486] [487]. Also, take a look at (yet) short workshop talk page.

Multiple other pages where this KGB nonsense is alleged. Examples:

• "I think this your "conversation" [with Irpen] is a torture, a psychological torture, something very similar to interrogation. Why do you think it is?"
• "That is how influential [is Irpen] (I can only guess why).

The chances of the ArbCom producing a cohesive outcome are greatly hampered if case' pages become unreadable, unusable and useless. This brings disconnected, often out of the blue, decisions. As of now the Editor findings section of the Kirill Lokshin's workshop proposal does no list Biophys among the 22 (!) editors on which this Arbitrator prepares finding. Perhaps, he thinks that having an ArbCom comment on Biophys is less crucial than for Malik Shabazz or even Relata refero. I am less concerned whether this ArbCom is going to sanction Biophys explicitly but something needs done asap to curb Biophys' turning this case into such a horrible mess.

And I hope no one will try the line of me just trying to "eliminate" or "silence the most dangerous opponent". His posts are not dangerous to anyone at whom they are directed as their outright inutility is seen to most people. Biophys is dangerous for the case as a whole as he makes a mess out of it making any coherent outcome less likely.

Biophys: enough is enough (Update)

In response to the above, Biophys posted even more of the same crankery to this very page. Here are some of his edits:

• "yes, there is a dangerous tag team led by Irpen"
• "Promotion of Soviet propaganda by Irpen"
• "I did not tell that Irpen or anyone else actually implemented plans "A" and "B", although this is something entirely possible, in light of the recent CAMERA lobbing case.
• "Anything is possible, especially after CAMERA case. Something is not only possible, but logical and inevitable."
• "Irpen has a tag team everyone is afraid of".

I am speechless and I am going to try to convince arbitrators to intervene in this to stop further deterioration of the case. --Irpen 17:25, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Some responses to other evidences

After I posted my initial evidence (above) Piotrus started a new discussion at my talk where he repeated his assertions that he was logging my (and other people's) edits only for his "defense" and stated his interest in peace. Peaceful environment is was I want in this corner of Wikipedia for a long time and I had a long discussion with Piotrus at my talk. While that discussion was ongoing, I refrained from posting any new evidence on Piotrus no matter how unfair I saw his comments that he continued to post to the pages of this arbcom. At some point Piotrus stopped responding at my talk and I consider this a sign of his withdrawal.

Instead of responding to everything posted by others, I would first urge everyone to actually click on the supporting diffs. While time-consuming, clicking on the diffs would help to find what parts of the evidence are "supported" by the supposed diffs that simply do not check out.

However, I would like to respond to some of the stuff posted by others.

Moreschi

On Moreschi's evidence I find this so much devoid of substance and so much outside of this case that I don't understand why it is at the arbcom at all. With this case being about Piotrus' practices, not the quality of my edits, bringing up an article Piotrus has never edited seems well beside the point.

Still, it is worth pointing out that Holodomor is the most controversial of all articles related to Ukraine and the most difficult subject in the debate that currently goes on in the Ukrainian society. No wonder that this article is being attacked all the time by POV-pushers of all sides. I take a special interest in this article, partly, because this famine affected my own family (well, my ancestors of course) and I resent their suffering being used by unscrupulous people to advance their nationalist political agendas. I wrote a good chunk of this article in its earlier stages but for the last year or so I mainly try to keep it at least somewhat balanced as it undergoes a steady stream of injections of controversial stuff by POV pushers (many of who are SPA's.)

Turning Holodomor into a decent article would require a thorough overhaul which is impossible when nationalist POV-pushers try and retry to crowd this article with political rhetoric. I agree that the article is very bad in terms of structure and grammar but I assert that it is reasonably balanced (especially for such a killer subject) presenting all mainstream POV's without undue weight. It is difficult to persuade top-notch copy editors to smooth out the bumps in prose that largely result from the fact that many of the contributors are writing in their second or even third language. Also, independent peer review of the article is next to impossible because of its ongoing internecine warfare about content, so it is never stable enough to go to Peer Review. I have made 418 of the 3439 edits to the article, or 12%, and, unfortunately, a significant part of these edits were to remove vandalism and blatant POV violations. Perhaps the joint board suggested at the workshop could help and I called for a creation of such body for a very long time [488]. I would be interested to see an article whose topic is at least as controversial as Holodomor that Moreschi edits a lot and succeeds in making it any better.

I don't understand why starting from about a year ago Moreschi displays such an uncalled for level of hostility and bashes my name on any forum where he gets a chance [489]. I tried to elaborate on it a little bit here. It is difficult for me to say anything beyond that because Moreschi's accusations glaringly lack any meaningful specifics.

Since Moreschi's own conduct are not the subject of this ArbCom, I see no need to crowd this evidence page with anything that concerns his own actions. Due to his expressed and uncalled for dislike of myself I try to minimize my interaction with him which is not too difficult since I never saw him writing anything in the topics that interest me.

Biophys

Biophys changed his evidence so many times and some of the stuff he posted, removed, changed, reposted, edited, etc. is so outrageous that I am not going to follow it and adjust my responses according to his alterations. Below are some responses to his earlier versions of the evidence. They are linked to these permanent links of these versions. Mostly, they preserve the relevance to his later versions.

On Holodomor denial article

In response to alleged misconduct at this article I would ask anyone to actually take a look at the history of this article and its talk page. The article was started by Horlo, a single-purpose account whose sole agenda of editing Wikipedia is spreading "truth" about the unique Ukrainian suffering in the hands of Russians. In his quest, Horlo created two POV forks of the Holodomor article titled: Holodomor denial and Holodomor-genocide denial.

The subjects of these so called "articles" was neutrally covered in Holodomor article and lack of any scholarly research specifically on the issue of denial does not allow to create encyclopedic articles on the denials themselves. What these articles remain to this day is an ORish hodge-podge of disparate stuff Horlo and a couple of other editors managed to google by searching for any string that would include words Holodomor and denial in one text. Talk pages contain multiple objections by myself, Relata refero and several other editors which are brushed aside. With the objections not being answered at all, several editors are taking turns in removing the tag from an article. From time to time, they demand for a tag explanation all anew, ignoring the objections stated multiple times at talk pages. In fact, behavior that consists in "continual questioning with obvious or easy-to-find answers" is widely considered to be a sign of obvious trolling.

Relata refero, who stated that many times, is completely neutral and uninvolved in any EE spats. In fact Gatoclass, another respected editor and admin, expressed the very same concerns about this article in its early stage and later left the issue due to exasperation. I would welcome his comments on the issue.

"Following Piotrus" claim

On this section I have two comments. First, despite Piotrus meticulously follows my activity in all corners of Wikipedia I do not reciprocate this dubious honor. I stated multiple times that I do not follow Piotrus edits. I only get to editing the articles that I see on the new article's announcement board or if they are attempted to be pushed to a main page through a DYK-path. I challenge anyone to find a single article created by Piotrus to which I got before its being announced on one of these boards. I had to watchlist the DYK submission page after this incident because while it is not my intent to follow Piotrus' articles per se, I care what appears on the Wikipedia's main page because I care for the reputation of this project.

Second, regarding the Przyszowice massacre, that Biophys' claims that since "[t]his article is about an important but a local event it, [t]herefore, was described mostly in the Polish press" is a problem. Polish press is no better or worse than any other press but press' being a reliable source of current events (which is the purpose of the press' existence) does not make it a reliable source on history. If the subject is a remote historic event and not a single academic publication is found to describe it, it's a problem. This was the subject of the discussion at Talk:Przyszowice massacre as well as at this noticeboard.

Martintg

This editor truly stands apart from the crowd being second only to Piotrus by the attention he pays to all my edits. I became used to having to edit under such magnifying glass and my heart is full of pity to people who have nothing better to do with their time than scrutinize my activity but most of Martin's "evidence" does not require any response beyond actually clicking on the diffs to see that they simply do not check out.

If, I may, I would just quote what I said earlier that experienced wikibattle combatants know that the surest way to derail any arbcom case (or even an ANI discussion) is to be on a permanent rampage of changing and expand the scope. His "evidence" to the case about Piotrus' practice being so much out of the scope demonstrate this rampage exactly as well as his inexplicable obsession of myself.

I will just respond to the redirect salting issue that I raised here. Salting a redirect can be innocuous or it can be a deliberate trick to chain the article to the particular title. All redirects Piotrus salted are redirects from the non-Polish titles to the articles he moved to the Polish titles. Many of these titles are part of the old Gdansk/Danzig issue. Other are also titles where the Polishness of the article's name may be disputed. Piotrus did not see any need to salt redirects that resulted from the article being moved away from the Polish titles here.

Martin did exactly the same thing once with Estonian pirates and the discussion of this is available here. He claimed "confusion" (about capitalization) back then and at this page. The uninvolved admin who cleaned up the mess with redirects and unscorched that move commented:

"Martintg moved, blanked the redirect, and recreated precisely the same, all within one minute after moving, and he did the same thing, systematically, on two separate moved pages. That does look like he knew very well what he was doing, and it certainly had nothing to do with the confusion about capitalization."[490]

I have nothing else to add on the salting redirects matter.

Molobo

Of all the stuff raised by Molobo, I would just respond to one thing, not because it is less obvious than the rest, but because in view of the events that actually took place, a particular point he is raising is truly ironic.

Here Molobo recalls the post I made 2.5 (!) years ago where I describe sarcastically the common ways of articles' derailing that I witnessed. There, I referred to a particularly annoying mode of editing, that I later dubbed by the term "traveling content". This mode consists of pasting extensive article pieces (or the whole articles) into other articles on remotely related (or way too wide) topics. This is much broader disruption than mere POV-forking. Classic POV-forking is actually a small part of the various "traveling content" operations. In that 2.5 year old post I described that disruption. Molobo fails to mention that I never made any of such edits and in that thread I actually call on all editors to not do it.

Ironically, in my recent discussion with Piotrus a recent incident of content traveling came up. While I talked about it as early as 2.5 years ago and called upon all the editors to not do it, this is what Piotrus and Molobo have done lately.

A brief piece of old history before we see its recent developments. In early-2006 Halibutt wrote a rather, IMO, unfortunate section, out of place for such a broad article. Back then he added a hastily written section titled "Treatment of the Polish citizens under Soviet Occupation" directly into History of Poland (1939-1945). It was soon somewhat developed and NPOVed a little bit at which point Piotrus and myself had a very peaceable agreement that it is out of place in that article. So, it was actually Piotrus who split that section off into a separate article. Then Richardusr did a great job expanding and NPOVing that article which also got renamed in the course of this expansion into a much more neutral title Occupation of Poland (1939–1945) at which it peaceably remains to this day.

However, by February 2008 it was not already good enough for already radicalized Piotrus. Whether the title was "too neutral", or Nazi crimes "balanced" Soviet crimes too much, but on February 17, 2008 Piotrus forked half of that article, into a title which is much more eloquent: Soviet repressions of Polish citizens (1939-1946). Now, eight months later that article remains a bit for bit fork! Perhaps, good enough for Piotrus but still not good enough for his friend Molobo who pasted its copy bit for bit into a third article (!) which was no other but the very first base of this very content. Here is how this March Molobo pastes that extensive piece back into History of Poland (1939-1945). Thus is in a way, this piece of text fully circumnavigated the Wikipedia. Due to that, the NPOV tag beautifies the History of Poland article to this day and our discussion of this fascinating round-the-wiki travel is here.

I am glad that Molobo brought up the issue of content travel during this case as it is truly fascinating.

Evidence presented by Martintg

Irpen's chronic assumption of bad faith detrimental to collaboration

I've not had that much interaction with Irpen, but what I have observed is that he suffers from a chronic tendency to assume the worst in people, particularly with those people he identifies as belonging to groups that have had historical conflict with Russia. His chronic lack of good faith, which he demands other people maintain, is justified by his view that "Wikipedia:Assume good faith does not say "be a fool" anywhere inside it." [491]. Yet on the other hand he displays seemingly unlimited good faith in regard to his fellow compatriots, where he has a tendency to doggedly defend disruptive editors such as User:RJ CG (who btw is currently serving a 2 month ban)[492] [493] and Ilya1166(User:Miyokan) [494] against admin intervention. This chronic assumption of bad faith against people of different backgrounds gets in the way of effective collaboration.

Irpen's long term obsession against Piotrus and tendency to harrass rather than collaborate

Irpen has been obsessed with Piotrus long before I joined the project. He continues to make the same unfounded accusations of bad faith of Piotrus on all the possible forums, over and over again. The depth of his obsession with Piotrus was breathtakenly demonstrated when he jumped straight into this ArbCom case within one day of returning from a month long wikibreak to battle with his old foe. I have to agree that there appears to be a pattern of harassment rather than collaboration as described in Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Piotrus_2/Evidence#Irpen_versus_Piotrus:_harassment_rather_than_collaboration. Another example is when Irpen made a bad faith nomination for deletion of the article Soviet_repressions_of_Polish_citizens_(1939-1946) within 24 hours of its creation by Piotrus [495], despite Piotrus explaining in the article talk page his intentions with the work in progress. The result was an over whelming snowball keep. The only person to support Irpen for deletion was User:Deacon of Pndapetzim, who added a polonophobic comment to his delete vote [496]. During the deletion debate, other editors noted that rapidity of the nomination after article creation could only be possible if Irpen was monitoring Piotrus' activities.

Irpen's accusations of page move salting and related teaming

Accusations of page move salting against Piotrus is another example of Irpen's bad faith assumptions. Similar bad faith assumptions were made against me when he reported me to ANI after I moved a page. In that case there was a proposal to move the article Estonian pirates. Following the WP:RM process, after quite some extensive discussion on the article talk page over many days, to which Irpen was not a party, consensus was achieved, the debate was for all practical purposes closed, and I moved the article to the new title [497]. Irpen swooped in out of the blue and reported me to ANI for salting a page redirect because the "debate went against me". (I messed up the page move without being aware a move could be salted until Irpen put the bean up his nose). Then a number of Irpen's friends, who were never involved in the move discussion, arrived after the ANI report was lodged, claiming the move request was not closed (technically it wasn't, I had forgotten to close the WP:RM entry), moved the article back to the original title and attempted to reopen the debate and cast their votes (a vote which was meaningless since the debate had since moved forward from the original proposal), probably in support of Irpen's claim that the debate was "ongoing". In the end, an uninvolved admin could clearly see that consensus was achieved before I made the move and therefore the move was done legitimately, albeit messily with no ill intent despite the claim by FuturePerfect, and the ANI report was thus closed [498]. However the incident was totally disrupting and I felt harassed. To my mind, this was a concrete example of Irpen engaging in WP:BATTLE. Martintg (talk) 20:26, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Teaming and disregard of Wikipedia policy to promote Russian nationalist POV

The article Occupation of the Baltic republics by Nazi Germany was moved to Occupation of the Baltic states by Nazi Germany in January 2008 to align with the the parent article Occupation of the Baltic States by User:Renata3, which also brought it into compliance with the naming convention policy [499]. However this was opposed by Russian nationalist editor User:Dojarca and was reverted a couple of times in April [500] on the basis that he believed that the title should reflect Russian political POV that the Nazis occupied Soviet republics. Irpen then intervened out of the blue in support of Dojarca (Irpen claimed he had the article on his watchlist, except that he never edited the topic previously and did not detect Renata3's move in January). A discussion was started on the talk page, along with subsequent searches revealing a trend that "Baltic states" was more common than "Baltic republics" by a factor of 10 to 1 in English usage, both during the time of the occupation and in current usage. At that point Irpen began a vote prematurely before the discussion was fully developed, contrary to guidelines that state that early votes can be divisive. The appearance of User:Deacon of Pndapetzim magically followed (I don't recall him ever editing any article about the Baltic states before) to stack the voting. The move request was subsequently closed with no concensus.

Article ownership issues

It is a fact that some nationalist teams have taken ownership of certain articles, making it impossible to improve them. A rather disturbing case in point is the article Anti-Russian sentiment, which while being a historically notable topic, is being used as a hook for a coatrack and soapbox of current political grievances against particular countries. Thus is in fact an attack page against those countries. For example, some Russian nationalist editors assert legitimate Baltic citizenship and language laws is evidence of "anti-Russian sentiment" and thus worthy of inclusion in this article, not based upon any Wikipedia policy or convention, but purely a synthesis based upon their personal view on who their enemy is. To understand how bad this article really is, and why it needs a complete total re-write, if not deletion, is to compare and contrast it to the article Anti-Polish sentiment. Some may say this is purely a content issue, to be dealt with normal dispute resolution processes, but this is now impossible, with a team of editors owning this article. It is a pity that our most experienced editors like Irpen and Alex Bakharev would spend their time battling over some obscure foreign language reference in some article on some obscure (but interesting) area of Polish history, rather than use their authority in making this article "Anti-Russian sentiment" acceptable. Instead they seem to want to maintain the status quo, even viewing the article as useful in encouraging new Russian editors (presumably like User_talk:Victor_V_V) not to view Wikipedia as a "propaganda tool". Martintg (talk) 00:07, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Evidence presented by Slrubenstein

Reply to greg park avenue

Greg, why do you introduce my name to these proceedings when I have not made any complaint against Piotrus and am not a party to the RfA? It seems to me that you are just looking for an excuse to accuse me of trolling and of being a sockpuppeteer. You have no evidence of my being a sockpuppeteer because I am not one but since you have made the accusation please provide your evidence. As to my message on your talk page, it was a very civil response to your anti-Semitic comment. And you not only refused to apologize you simply made more insults. Wikipedia is large and there is some wriggle room for anti-Semites with you (yes, anyone who thinks the word "Jew" is an insult is an anti-Semite) but trust me, sooner or later people will lose patience with you. My advice to you is to start acting civilly, and not look for excuses to insult other editors. Now, can you put your money where your mouth is? You just accused me of sockpuppetry. Please provide your evidence (or if you retract the accusation you may strike it out and apologize) Slrubenstein | Talk 18:53, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

evidence presented by User:ww

I cannot speak to issues involving Poland or Russia articles, as my interactions with Piotrus have been limited to those article we both have interest in. I have found him strongly opinionated (not gounds for ArbCom action) and not disruptive. He has contacted me once or twice (on my talk page) to warn me about proposed deletion of a page we are both interested in. His interactions with me, and those I've otherwise observed, have not been such as to lead me to suspect him to be a user who hasn't Wikipedia's interests in mind, nor one who is interested in misusing Wikipedia and its mechanisms on behalf of some underhanded agenda. I would suggest ArbCom pay careful attention to the evidence in this case as, having read it (at extreme length!), it seems to me that the case is not well established. ww (talk) 16:34, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Evidence presented by M.K.

Piotrus battlefield tactics

As an editor, who is working on the EE themes, I often find myself in situations when even most tiny content editing leads to disappointment, as almost every time Piotrus and his friends jump in and convert situation into messy battlefield, by inserting "preferred version" of article, "preferred sources" , "preferred POV", etc. Here is how it works.

Piotrus' Edit wars and revert warring

Piotrus involvement into constant revert warring campaigns speaks about the ways this user treats different views which do not suit his beliefs. Back in the 2007 the situation was already stressed by his revert warring, but now we are in 2008 and situation did not improved. It became worse.

In the past weeks alone the articles affected by Piotrus' revert warring were:

• Controversies of the Polish–Soviet War,
• Lwów pogrom (1918),
• Boleslaw I's intervention in the Kievan succession crisis, 1018,
• Lithuanian Territorial Defense Force,
• Polish–Lithuanian relations during World War II
• Żydokomuna

His last 3RR block was already discussed here by others.

Piotrus' recent editwarring over Controversies of the Polish–Soviet War reveals the problematic, but typical, aspect of Piotrus conduct yet again. As usually Piotrus redirects all the blame to his opponent [501], but uninvolved contributors are starting to see that through:

• "While Boodlesthecat did in fact violate 3RR, that does not make Piotrus exempt from WP:EDITWAR (which is clearly what he was involved in)....Also, if I would have got to the report earlier (before the report was stale) I would have blocked both parties.
• Piotrus would like you to overlook the fact that it takes two to tango. If there is an edit war, there are at least two warriors. While pointing to Boodlethecat's block history, Piotrus neglects to mention the admonitions he has received that 3RR is not an entitlement. This is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
• I most certainly agree, and I think that Piotrus fails to see that it takes two to edit war..

Moreover Piotrus engaged into block shopping on admin IRC as summarized by Tiptoety. All this recent drama could be avoided if Piotrus followed good editing practice, and remembered that the burden of evidence lies with the editor who adds or restores material (in this case it is Piotrus). However Piotrus only used talk page immediately after filing the 3RR case against his opponent [502][503], trying to make a false impression that he tried discussing. This is a textbook case how Piotrus handles his opponents - by seeking a block rather than consensus.

Coordinated edit warring

Polish unhelpful coordinated editing - well known

It is not a secret and the community long time ago noticed unhelpful coordinated editing involving a group of Polish editors. Some observations by different contributors:

• Another reason is that there is a small group of Polish nationals on Wikipedia who have been pushing their own agenda: Renaming articles from English names to what they regard as the "correct" Polish-language names. Some of these Wikipedians (including at least one admin) seem to think that if they can push through the changes in the face of opposition, that they'll have a claim for making the changes stick during future discussions...have an admin in their number who often generates "calls to action" to get them all posting on a particular page, they are often able to all chime in to a particular discussion, and make it look as though there's a community consensus to keep the Polish name, when in reality it's just the same group of Poles posting over and over, moving from page to page, and in general ignoring or belittling any opposition,
• It has been happening all over Polish articles, with topics that they never edited before suddenly being besieged by Polish editors, and rules everyone else follows being swept aside by their block voting.
• It is not the number that counts, but it was the timing that was a little conspicuous. Piotrus was the first from this board to oppose, on 3 May 05:59; Darwinek followed on 16:52, Halibutt 19:04, Lysy 20:02, Appleseed the next day on 2:45 and LUCPOL on 16:35. 5 days of silence, and suddenly 6 entries in a day and a half.
• I am continually annoyed with this blind bandwagon-style following around that is going on. The issue is that a group of editors is constantly trying to rile up individuals who do not agree with their POV regarding naming.
• Since Piotrus has a vast array of IRC and IM friends, happy to blindly revert to Piotrus's edits I doubt that it would work, but we can try

Piotrus advocates the use of IM

It is not a secret that some Polish editors widely use off-wiki communication channels to discuss Wikipedia related matters. In early days these Gadu Gadu team conferences were advertised on Wikipedia.

• Piotrus asks for Gadu Gadu number. And just a weak later whole team is runing off-line conference inviting others to join them We together with Balcer and Halibutt are running a conference on GG. I strongly recomend using GG.
• Yet another user, who later engaged in disruptive sockpuppetry [504], is invited to join Piotrus' off-wiki activities We together with Balcer and Halibutt are organizing conference on GG. I strongly recommend using Gadu Gadu.
• Are you using GG. Very useful beast for discussing articles, etc, declares Piotrus to his mate user:Tymek.
• Most of important discussions are announced on Poland related notice board, therefore it is usefull to have ot on a watchlist. In addition we do inform each other bout interesting things on GG lectures Piotrus to his another friend user:Darwinek

It is not a secret that Piotrus continues to recruit new users till now: [505]; [506];[507].

Looking into one piece of puzzle it might look like nothing wrong, but when putting all pieces into one place, you get the staggering picture, revealing systematical mechanism how "proper" POV is imposed to articles:

Piotrus and coordinated edit warring

It is staggering to see how little time it takes for revert team to form in edit wars with Piotrus involvement. Patern is always the same - Piotrus gets involved in edit war, and soon he is joined by one of the Gadu Gadu users.

Typical example: Piotrus runs an edit war [508],[509]. But he turns up to be not alone. He is helped by user:Molobo (GG buddies with Piotrus for ages) and user:Kpalion.

• Molobo's first and only contribution to this article main space is in sync revert with Piotrus[510].
• Kpalion joins revert war in article he also never edited before, and his only main space contribution to it is a revert[511]
  • Note: Kpalion comes in just two weeks after exchanging GG contacts with Piotrus, again on Piotrus initiative (Maybe you are using GG, it is sometimes better to discuss articles and our projects this way Hi, my GG number is 6023893. Please feel free to contact me at any time. Cheers).

Those two users are not the only ones contributing to this article with nothing but reverts. Piotrus reaches 3rr limit:

• 1st revert 03:23, 24 October 2007
• Uninvolved editor starts editing 03:56, 27 October 2007. But is immediately Reverted by Piotrus 2nd revert 00:58, 27 October 2007
• Uninvolved User adds reference 04:47, 27 October 2007. But is immediately reverted by Piotrus yet again 3rd revert 04:54, 27 October 2007.

Now that Piotrus is on 3RR limit, user:Tymek, who never edited this article before, joins revert war, and reverts edits by a neutral contributor 06:12, 27 October 2007

Off course it not the only instance when facing 3RR Piotrus is saved by one of his off-wiki communication partners, whose only contribution is reverting to version reverted by Piotrus before.

Same pattern different article:

• 1st revert 23:05, 4 September 2007
• 2nd revert 23:20, 4 September 2007
• 3rd revert 23:25, 4 September 2007

And now when Piotrus exhausted his 3RR limits, user:Darwinek steps in 23:38, 4 September 2007. This revert is Darwinek's first ever contribution to the article main space, and the next revert is his last ever edit here 23:55, 4 September 2007

Another Piotrus' revert war:

• 15:52, 9 September 2007
• 20:02, 9 September 2007

is joined by Darwinek 20:14, 9 September 2007. In this case also it is the first and the only Darwinek's contribution to main space.

Same article. Piotrus gets involved in edit war again:

• 15:27, 16 September 2007
• 02:39, 17 September 2007.

This time Tymek, who also never edited this article before, comes to help. And this remains Tymek's only main space contribution (not counting one minor edit almost a year later), 14:33, 17 September 2007

Similar pattern can be seen in Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland article as well.

Three reverts by Piotrus:

• 1st revert 19:03, 30 July 2008
• 2nd revert 19:07, 30 July 2008
• 3rd revert 19:13, 30 July 2008

And when Piotrus reached 3RR mark, user:Alden Jones steps in 20:33, 30 July 2008 . Of course this revert is Alden Jones' first ever contribution to this article. His next revert is his last [512]

It is astounding how often same editors appear during Piotrus' revert wars with one goal - only to revert to Piotrus version, not contributing to those articles in any other way.

Yet another revert war by Piotrus:

• 04:25, 27 March 2008
• 12:27, 28 March 2008
• 15:50, 28 March 2008

Soon it is joined by Darwinek 16:30, 28 March 2008 . This revert is Darwinek's first and only main space contribution to the article.

And another one:

• 12 January - 28 February 2008: Piotrus tries without discussion to get rid of a picture that he [513] [514]
• 13:34, 29 February 2008) I comment: "For quite a time ,a single registered contributor is trying to remove a particular picture...".
• 14:01, 29 February 2008 (half an hour later) Darwinek, who never ever edited this article before, reverts to Piotrus version
• 14:50, 29 February 2008 immediate revert of Darwinek; these two reverts are Darwinek's only contributions to the article.
• 14:55, 29 February 2008, Piotrus proclaims: "And for the record, it's not a "single editor"; others apparently agree with me too (ex. link to recent Darwinek's reverts)."

Another revert war, but strategies the same:

Piotrus is engaged in another revert war with a different editor:

• 21:14, 15 May 2008
• 22:14, 15 May 2008
• 20:56, 16 May 2008,

user:Tymek joins him 04:44, 18 May 2008 . Of course it is Tymek's first and only main space edit in this article.

And another example. In Treaty of Vilna article, Piotrus' reverts:

• 21:33, 18 July 2008
• 14:22, 21 July 2008
• 17:12, 1 August 2008
• 00:47, 2 August 2008 etc. etc.

are repeated by Alden Jones:

• 10:32, 1 August 2008
• 15:25, 1 August 2008
• 15:58, 1 August 2008
• 22:02, 1 August 2008

These reverts are of course user:Alden Jones only contribution, same thing on Trakai Voivodeship, etc.

Team Piotrus: Summary

I could continue this list, but I'm sure it is informative as it is, to get full picture. Pattern is annoyingly identical:

• Piotrus gets involved in revert warring and suddenly a friend of his who usually never edited this article even once "helps" reverting
• they are connected with Piotrus by Gadu Gadu;
• as a rule - the revert is their first edit on specific page, and often reverting to Piotrus version is their only contribution to those articles main space.

Placing together past community concerns and mass evidences from main space editing, coordinated nature of these revert wars is beyond any doubt circumvent the normal process of consensus-forming.

M.K. (talk) 08:25, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Tendentious edits

Another issue which should be addressed is that Piotrus' tendentious edits are one of the prime tools converting Wikipedia in never ending battlefield. For instance:

• Piotrus constantly manipulates fact and similar tags. Tags which added by his opponents he considers as "tag spam"[515][516][517], but when he uses them - it is perfectly acceptable [518][519];
• Piotrus advocates for the article names, which he calls the most "popular" English ones [520][521], but when there is initiative to have indeed prevailing English article names, Piotrus will find ample of excuses why names, which suits to his personal agenda should be kept instead [522][523][524][525][526][527] (past "explanations" are good examples how Google search should not be carried out);
• Selective implementation of WP:UNDUE is another key fact of Piotrus editing, - when information does not suit his interpretation of events it is becoming an undue issue [528][529], but when information parades Polish pride or his POV, UNDUE becomes not an issue:
  • [530][531][532], situation was summarized pretty well Yes, and Lossowski is the holy grail of truth and unbiased information.
  • Other examples - [533][534][535][536][537]. Excellent case study for this issue, involving most recent events, would be Lwów pogrom (1918), summarized pretty well by this and especially this: Well, well, well. You see Piotrus, keyword in this case is not "criminals" but "Ukrainian criminals". What is the point of showing the references that mention just criminals, and adding extremely biased "mainly Ukrainian criminals" to the lead section? So far you failed to present multiple reliable sources for "mainly Ukrainian criminals", but yet you keep adding it time and time again. When this is done in the lead section it is straight forward WP:TE.
• Currently community considering blocking Piotrus, alongside with his opponent, for the tendentious editing [538]

False edit summaries

Piotrus often employs misleading edit summaries during contested information removal. For instance:

• On Ignacy Domeyko his long-time friend removing info he doesn't like [539], soon Piotrus jumps in and among other things also removes the same contested info (Domeyko stated "I may never change my citizenship now...) with the summary "large c/e", even though he had also reverted
• On Sejny Uprising arguing that consensus is not needed when removing contested information (in this case a citation), he also secretly removed POV title tag with no explanation, despite claims that it was "explained on talk". Despite my requests over and over again to produce rationale, he provided no rationale till today.
• Another characteristic example [540], absolutely no indications on edit summary that Piotrus removes and contested information, just blunt "+".
• Under such "explanatory" edit summaries as rv to neutral version (Polish-American sociologist claims... give us a break ; no weaseling of Piotrowski; please - c/e of latest additions; c/e, improving English hides wholesale removal and revision of information. Pleas by involved editor to justify such removal again, and again, were in vain as till today those questions are not answered by Piotrus. Would like to draw an attention to technique which was employed in this article - Piotrus asks for citations for particular sentences [541] (like The tensions between Germans and LVR was growing, on April 12...), contributor delivers those requests [542] (take note to the same The tensions between Germans and LVR was growing, on April 12, ...) , but Piotrus jumps in and removes everything and again asking for the same citations on the same sentences [543] (look at The tensions between Germans and LVR was growing, on April 12...]. And we have this circus when a contributor asks for sources, then receives them but still removes them and asks again. This is textbook case example of Piotrus editing techniques (with edit warring); sadly such technique is also employed by some of his Polish friends [544].

Forum shopping and character assassination

Piotrus employs forum shopping and character assassination in order to win his content disputes.

This tactics is usually used when Piotrus can't win content disputes by his prime strategy - revert warring. For instance:

• I initiated a dispute resolution process on Ostrów Agreement article (3O) in regards of Piotrus original research and synthesis. Yet when neutral contributor produces his opinion, one of the first Piotrus "job" is to jump on neutral contributor's talk page and present "evidences" of my alleged misbehavior from past Piotrus' Arb case [545] for the "full picture". Again no content discussion just about me.
• One of the Piotrus' friends was caught using shameful editing practice, Piotrus jumps in and again attacks me with complete irrelevant and misleading allegations like two Arb Cases; "all arguments" etc..
• Another attempt to attack and present contributor less credible, with misleading allegations [546] (I never renamed that article).
• On Lwów pogrom (1918) article another editor became involved - Piotrus first "job" is to inform him about some sort of "anti-editor bias on the part of some editors involved in the discussion at that article". Identical situation - no content related discussion. Despite that Piotrus all the time delivers to his opponents a lecture about discussing edits, not editors. Of course he does not apply his rule to himself.
• As Bloodlescat is on Piotrus agenda, most of this tactics recently employed against him, as i witnessed. Few observations which I witness so far - accusations violation of 10RR all over the place (I am unaware that Bloodlescat was blocked due to 10RR) again; and again; and again; and again and again. While I never encouraged violations over edit warring be it 4RR of 5RR, misleading the community about what person never did, is not only unethical, but is gross character assassination.
• Same goes with Bloodlescat mail which was delivered to Piotrus. After the email was reported and Boodles blocked for an additional 24h for that, Piotrus still wanted more, refused complete cooperation, demanded an apology asked for more again protested again tried another sysop. While Boodles apologized for that email as Piotrus officially wanted, he brought it up again as evidence in the RfAr and tries again.
• Polish view suffering fiasco during initiated rename procedure, Piotrus travels to one forum [547] where he is ignored by community. Having failed to gather support for his POV, travels to yet another one forum where his view was not supported, but this don't stop him for traveling to a third one.
• Boodles 3RR-case [548] in which he gets unblocked. After the unblock, Piotrus travels to another admin with a complaint: [549].
• To summarize Piotrus' behavior - Piotrus, you've won your edit-war, and had him blocked for 48 hours, but now you're over-reaching. Try to win the content disputes on the article Talk: page, not by getting your opponents banned, ok?
• Forum shopping is indivisible part of Piotrus editing practice. Back in 2006 such editing pratice was straight forward named as trolling. At present day situation did not improved as we see. M.K. (talk) 10:42, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Personal POV instead of consensus

Piotrus says he welcomes outside opinion, but what happens when outside opinion is not in his favor?:

• Well he simply reverts it with ad hominem edit summaries in this case Francis, you are not the Village Pump; [550]
• When neutral admin judged involved sides critically, including Piotrus [551], Piotrus protests and contests his decisions by accusing of censorship and personal attacks endorsement(reply), claiming ad nauseam that uninvolved admin abused his powers when protected the article [552] and using his admin powers to over turn protection [553].
• When a DR procedure initiated by me (WP:3O), concluded that Piotrus additions, as feared, indeed where original research and synthesis [554] and should be eliminated from main space, after it is done so Piotrus jumps in and declares that there was no consensus to do so, in contrast to outside opinion. It takes me another around to finally eliminate his OR [555]. Shame a lot of time is consumed eliminating single Piotrus OR.
• On heated dispute on Dubingiai massacre Piotrus became the only editor who made major revision of article [556], after invitee appearance nor without consent of involved parties nor, I think, without approval of invitee (perhaps invitee change his opinion now), despite the fact that reconciliation project (never finished) was started to find consensus among editors not to impose preferred and single POV,as Piotrus did.
• Another recent incident when Piotrus preferred his views instead of finding consensus - I initiated DR process (WP:3O) (over dispute of certain citation), after a long discussion with involving parties and neutral editors there were accepted suggestion to have contested citation in the specific article - Sejny Uprising. Suggestion welcomed by Piotrus him self [557]. Perfectly knowing from the past discussions and suggestions that one sided removal, instead of involved parties consensus, of particular citation and from this specific article, will cause frustration but Piotrus declares that consensus is not needed to remove it. And actually if he acted in the proper way of conduct he opened discussion before his one sided removal, if he indeed wanted to find a consensus he would opened RfC way before revert warring, not after.

Well now as I expect Piotrus in retaliation for my postings will attempt to show me as some sort most disruptive editor, as he did in the past. M.K. (talk) 08:31, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Evidence presented by User:Renata3

Piotrus entitlement attitude is absolutely disturbing

In his reply to Novickas, Piotrus claims that because he is 2100 times more active than an average editor he is entitled to more "bad" edits (uncivil comments, reverts, what not). I find these comments absolutely disturbing and disgusting.

One uncivil comment is one to many no matter where it comes from - a random IP or top 50 most active contributors. In fact, active editors should be held to a higher standard - they been around to know the rules and what's allowed.

Even more disturbing is his view that because he has more content contributions other editors have no right to criticize him. Since when does writing DYK or FA articles earn immunity from criticism? This illustrates pretty well his overall "I am better than you" attitude that make it hard to deal with him.

What Piotrus is arguing for is creating a class of "all equal, but some more so than others" or class of "untouchables." But the worst part is that he admits his record is not perfect, but instead of striving to be better he argues that he is entitled to be "badder"... Renata (talk) 05:33, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

PoeticBent engaged in blatant POV campaign during this ArbCom

From Oct 23 to Oct 28, PB engaged in blatant worst-kind POV campaign while this ArbCom considered sanctions against him (which include one year ban or mentorship).

• Oct 23: [558] In July 1943 alone, 167 Polish towns and villages were wiped off the face of Earth. The death squads were slowly moving towards Podole province, and not a single village was spared until August 1944 with thousands of Poles burned alive and slained with increasing cruelty day after day.
• Creation of Żeniówka, Kurdybań Warkowicki, Adamy, Hucisko Oleskie, Pańska Dolina: Ukrainian village, not a mention that it is there. Created for the only reason: to blame evil UPA for mass killings of innocent Poles (and on occasion Jews). Written from pre-WWII Polish POV.
• Creation of Dołha Wojniłowska, Bortnica, Netreba, Huta Stara (Tarnopol Voivodeship), Kisorycze, Borowskie Budki: same as above (at least mention that it is now Ukraine)
• Creation of Białozoryszki: Lithuanian village, written completely from pre-WWII Polish POV
• Creation of Matejkany and Mieżańce: Lithuanian village. Completely pre-WWII Polish POV. Created to praise Poles for helping Jewis.
• Oct 28: Creation of Wsielub: Belarusian village. Written from pre-WWII POV to show Polish help to Jews.

PB cited many Polish sources... I cannot fully evaluate them because of language barrier, but it seems most of them seem to be some kind of survivor memoirs which are naturally highly emotionally charged and POVed. But I don't see any effort to neutralize the language and observe NPOV policy. Some sources don't seem to pass verifiability (one source claimed population 400 when really only 110) and some incidents don't seem notable. As couple articles say, there were literally thousands of such villages and hundreds of thousands of victims. Wikipedia is not a place to document every one of them.

I could understand creation of one such deeply-flawed article by a newbie, but not over a dozen by an experienced editor over five-day period. Renata (talk) 01:27, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

Evidence presented by Angus McLellan

Piotrus does not comply with the Wikipedia:Ownership of articles policy

A confession

I rarely cross paths with Piotrus, Irpen, or anyone else involved in this case other than Deacon of Pndapetzim. My knowledge of these disputes is limited to recent editing of the Boleslaw I's intervention in the Kievan succession crisis, 1018. For the record, both Deacon of Pndapetzim and Piotrus encouraged my presence there. My contributions to date are limited to minor edits for style & language and a stream of consciousness commentary on the talk page. As a result, my evidence is narrow in scope.

Use of sources

Piotrus wishes the committee to treat the matter of Boleslaw ... 1018 as a content dispute, and as such outwith the committee's scope. My impression is otherwise. I see this as a matter of compliance with core policies. Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Franco-Mongol alliance demonstrates that the committee has considered such matters to be germane in the past. I do not suggest that Piotrus is in need of mentorship on this basis. But, as he has himself noted, he has made a great many contributions to the project. For that reason, the use of dubious sources, and potentially misleading to answers to enquiries concerning these, are a matter of concern.

The short history of the Boleslaw ... 1018 article is as follows. Piotrus expanded the article using a supplement to the Polish national daily newspaper Rzeczpospolita, Wyprawa Kijowska Chrobrego, as the principal source. It needs to be said that this source is not available to purchase, and is written in Polish, and is highly unlikely to be available to readers of the encyclopedia. By any measure, this is a poor choice of source when English-language sources meeting the standards set out in WP:V are widely available.

The article was submitted for GA review. The reviewers comments can be seen at Talk:Boleslaw I's intervention in the Kievan succession crisis, 1018/Archive02#GA Review Notes, and the article failed. It was resubmitted, discussion at Talk:Boleslaw I's intervention in the Kievan succession crisis, 1018#GA_on hold, and passed. In the course of the original review, Piotrus stated that Wyprawa Kijowska Chrobrego "is a collection of articles by several historians, so in fact you get views by different authors". When the matter was again raised by me, following the dispute over a rewrite, at Talk:Boleslaw I's intervention in the Kievan succession crisis, 1018#Jaworski, Piotrus decided that his earlier statement was no longer operative and that "all articles cited were written by Jaworski" and "almost all of the work (and all cited info) comes from Jaworski". Piotrus has since provided me with a scan of the article, and I confirm that his statements to me, but not in the original GA review, are correct.

On receiving the scans from Piotrus, I passed these to other interested parties and a partial translation was provided to me. From this, it was apparent that Piotrus had engaged in some degree of selective citation from Jaworski's article. Specifically, the article by Jaworski clearly states that Boris & Gleb were killed on Yaroslav's orders, and that history was rewritten by the winner to ensure that Svyatopolk was blamed. So far as I can tell, no such explicit statement has ever appeared in the article.

I note Novickas's comments in a similar vein at Wikipedia talk:Requests for arbitration/Piotrus 2#Use of sources. Perfection is impossible, and paraphrasing and summarising what sources say is an art rather than a science. Mistakes happen, but they can only get fixed if editors are frank and open in their dealings. My feeling is that Piotrus has not been frank and open in the matter of the Boleslaw ... 1018 article. Experienced editors must set an example in this regard by welcoming and encouraging others who wish to help the project develop by editing and rewriting. For these reasons, ownership of articles is unacceptable, and Piotrus, as an experienced editor, should be well aware of this and act accordingly. I believe that he has failed to do so on this occasion. Angus McLellan (Talk) 15:11, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Evidence presented by Molobo

I am a long time contributor of many articles. My contributions for example include Operation 1005,Kidnapping of Polish children by Nazi Germany, Potulice concentration camp, and numerous expansions to such articles as Wehrmacht war crimes. As you can likely guess most of them are controversial to certain people.

I have been subject to RfC,, bans, and countless personal disputes. I also watched Arbcoms, although to this date never been a subject of one(although perhaps I was mentioned on some). I made many mistakes in the past, but believe that I was refined in the process. For instance I now stick solely to encyclopedic information and language as much as possible. From my experience personal disputes and exchanges serve nothing on Wikipedia. Only sources and information should count. Additionally our time is brief and we should concentrate on content rather then personal disputes. Regarding Piotrus-he is not without some bias, but most of us are, he doesn’t shy away from debate and sources to expand articles. He is also a very productive contributor. He made perhaps some slips of language but looking into his number edits, that’s almost nothing compered to the amount of information and discussions he is engaged in.

Neverthless one issue I would like to adress on which Piotrus was accused.

Regarding Stor Stark7

The user in question has certainly strong and controversial views which he expresses on Wikipedia both in discussion and during edits on main pages. He is certainly very intelligent and never crosses a certain line, but looking at his edits, he has a certain bias. One of main activity is spreading information about Morgenthau Plan (an article which he wrote himself) and alledged war crimes of Allies(who he writes were a “gang”). The MP article is terribly biased and would need detailed re-write. Note for example that when added info that it was planned to stop Germany to potentially wage war again, this was removed by Stark[559]. From my experience most of his information is cutted in selective way, and responces are made by large copied text full of alledged wrongdoings of Allies and suffering of Germany.

Some examples of activity that might have influenced views on him among editors:

• He compared Jewish Holocaust to Expulsions of Germans and called for review of Jewish people who perished in Holocaust

[560].

• He wrote that USA was a “bad guy” when it fought Nazi Germany in 1944. It became good when it started to help Germany in 1947

After Germany had surrendered, the U.S. could do nothing besides start a war. Probably true. Before Germany surrendered the U.S. could have done a lot, and as far as I can tell even was an accomplice in the planning. Being a good guy in 1947 doesnt change the fact of being a bad guy in 1944

• Comparing Polish nation to war criminal

Maybe the Poles and Milosevic are in the same class.

• Insults about Poles in article about Kosovo discussion page

Let me reply that I'm sick and tired of some Poles still thinking that their nation is a perpetual victim that never ever did anything wrong, and then work their arses off to try to bury evidence to the contrary

• He created an article called American mutilation of Japanes war dead [American mutilation of Japanese war dead]

Where as one user noted This article should be merged with Allied war crimes during World War II. It is obviously being given undue weight by one editor (Stor stark7) who has a slanted viewpoint on the subject. Are we required to have a whole separate article about every miniscule aspect of a country's conduct in wartime now? If so, where is the Nazi mutilation of Holocaust victims article? How about Soviet army raping of German women? -- Grandpafootsoldier (talk) 22:37, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

• He made ethnic remarks about French invading Germany.

The french nation invaded sometime in the 1600's in its drive towards the Rhine. They were drafted into the army when Germany took control of the area 1940, they were only trusted to fight on the eastern front, and they were allowed to remain after the war despite their native land still being under French control. Jippey, thank you frenchies for your kindness

• Suggested on Causes of Second World War discussion page that Hitler declared war on Poland because Germans were mass murdered by Poles

[561] When faced with information that this was false flag operation by Nazi Germany and paramilitary Selbstschutz units he responded : Don't make yourself look even more foolish(...) I guess you don't like those things coming to light. As for the rest of your seltsbtschutz babble, Juck!!!- When several responces by several editors noted Lebensraum, Nazi ideology idea of conquest as reason for the war, Stork responded to them with following :Please lay off with the hyperbole the rest of you, I'm not denying Hitler was wanted war. all I've done is presented information that a respected historian claims Germans were killed before the war, and that this might have influenced the decision to go to war at that time. and I requested info where there might be more information. All the responses to that I've gotten are basically nonsense as their relation to the topic question

• Finally said that the there is no proof that there is no truth in Nazi propaganda:

:I keep telling myself, do not feed the...., sigh. All you have presented is that the Nazis used propaganda. You have provided nothing that says that there was no grain of truth behind it.

• Describing Polish minister who refused Hitler’s demands as “crazy”,”delusional” and claiming Poland wanted war with Hitler:

Also, the fact that the Polish foreign minister was crazy enough to want war in 1939, and actually thought they would win within 3 weeks should also be of note. A foreign minister has some influence on international politics, even a delusional, no?

I think the above can explain somewhat Piotrus reaction. An unexperienced person can of course make certain conclusions from such line of thought. If Stork didn’t wanted to be associated nationalist movements, he should be advised in the future to use more neutral statements and claims. However personally having some experience regarding WW2 history ideologies, I can say that for Piotrus statement this doesn’t need to be true. There is a movement called historic revisionism which can make such claims without crossing into neo-Nazi ideology, furthermore some other extreme political movements(both on the left or right) can make such statements. Neverthless I believe Piotrus reaction can be somewhat understood when seeing what Stork’s comments have been like.

Regarding Scinurae

In the past he mainly focused on Polish-German history, I certainly wouldn’t call him neo-Nazi, although he is a bit nationalistic teenager(at least he was when I first meet him) that bases his knowledge on his schoolbooks, which are rather short on Poland. This of course leads to certain issues. Fortunetely he calmed down somewhat but incivility remains a problem.

For example:

• Removal of information about persecution of Poles in Prussia [562]

• Removal of information and links to Herero Genocide made by Germany in article calling it irrelevant to history[563]

• Deletion of information on atrocities committed by German soldiers in Poland

[564]

• When I spotted some Nazi propaganda books used as sources on Wikipedia regarding history of Poland, and notified this to Reliable Source noticeboard[565] as well as to Moreschi for guidance, Scinurae suddenly appeared and tried to divert the discussion from the subject, by claiming I was attacking the editor who brought this publications.

[566]

• Trying to erase information about Nazi atrocities and defending German forces image during WW2

[567]

• Claiming that the Polish name Poznań is a point of view of modern time, discrimination of Poles was to achieve “national unity”, removal of information that the territories were taken from Poland by Germany

[568]

• Claims that expulsion of Poles from Germany was actually done to Polish “settlers”

[569]

• Removal of information regarding discrimination of minorities in German Empire, by changing it to “alienation”

[570]

• Removal of information of massacre by Teutonic Knights( a symbol in German nationalism), and adding instead that “the city flourished”

[571]

Tag teaming with Irpen and Deacon

A propaganda photo was put into the article by Irpen and Deacon-the event was marked by violence and rapes by Red Army, Irpen and Deacon added a photo from Soviet era showing the citizens welcoming troops. Scinurae appeared suddenly helping them to restore the picture.

• [572]
• [573]
• [574]
• [575]

Incivility:

• Your disjointed yawning-comment

• You clearly represent Polish nationalist interests to which you habitually count picking on Germany and Germans all throughout history until today.

• most often your replies make me roll my eyes, but this one was so lame and empty and evasive an answer, it made me laugh for a minute :-)

• you clearly represent Polish nationalist interests to which you habitually count picking on Germany and Germans all throughout history until today

In conclusion, I can say that the user is not exactly neutral, and some of his edits seem very controversial. Removing Nuremberg trial information or atrocities by Nazi Germany while trying to defend image of German forces in WW2 might have influenced the view about him among other editors. Especially incivility should be adressed

Irpen

I would be thankfull if Irpen would stop abusing my name in discussions not connected with me in person. I served my time so to speak, and find his repeated harassment incivil.

"am afraid that the Digwuren's return will become a nightmare similar only to Molobo's return from his a year old block"

Matthead

I would like to point out some tremendous incivility coming from that editor, for example:

Responce to other editor Stop your pathetic trolling.

Ethnic based attacks: Polish POV has been disseminated too far in the past, and will be reduced

Ethnic based insults: Seems like EndOfTrolling for Polish POV now, indeed

Ethnic insults "Frederick II making token gestures for the welfare of his new Polish subjects" His bio article says, "750 schools were built from 1772-1775." Maybe he should have build hundreds of token sand boxes and Kindergartens for his Polish subjects instead

In addition to removing important information without any comment

• From article Ostforschung information about genocide (German colonisation and the Germanisation of Eastern Europe by ethnic cleansing and genocide of local non-German populations)) was removed and replaced with

[576] dissemination of German cultural influence within the conquered areas of Eastern Europe

• In article about Felix Dahn information about discriminating Polish students under his administration of University of Wrocław was removed without any comment as well as information that ha belonged to far right, antisemitic group

[577]

I would like to have incivility issue resolved in case of this editor.

Irpen's battle-like tactics and veiled threats as responce to description of Soviet crime

Some while ago I edited the article Soviet Partisans with information regarding atrocities they comitted on territories of Second Polish Republic which were occupied by Soviet Union during WW2. As responce Irpen called my edits "trolling". That it itself is nothing new from Irpen he declared what he will do if "edits about evil of Russia and Soviet Union" will not be cut down by editors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Soviet_partisans/Archive_1#Common_Sense_and_Ethics "it would spare me the time of having to add well referenced information about:

• Treatment of Orthodox Church in the Commonwealth (as a separate section to the PLC article),
• details of the 1920 Polish "Victor's parade" in Kiev and its perception among Kievans as well as vandalous destruction of the city by the Polish army to the History of PL (18-39) article (similarly to lots of loosely relevant rant about Molotov and Brest parade that Halibutt and Molobo added to History of PL 39-45 article),
• well-referenced information about complicity of Polish resistance forces in the Holocaust events and in anti-Partisan collaboration with Nazis (similar to Molobo's attempt to turn this article into an article about the incidents between the Soviet partisans and the Poles) to the same Hisotry 39-45 article,
• two or three paragraphs (or even a separate section) about the Wisla Action to History of PL 39-45, and other similarly true and referenced information to other broad articles."

However Irpen also instructed Piotrus and Halibutt he won't do such edits if "I suggest Halibutt and Piotrus start cleaning up History of PL 39-45 article from what makes it like a publicist piece about evil Russia and Soviet Union."

To me this looked like a threat, and bullying essentialy telling that if editors will write about Soviet Crimes and against the worldview of Russian nationalism Irpen will engage in heavy-handed POV edits in articles about the countries editors come from. I believe this comment was one of the few when Irpen(who is very intelligent and tries to present a beheaved persona while pursuing his goals) showed how he works. Essentialy to me it seems as he tries to discourage editors from editing about Soviet crimes and Russia by engaging in long and tiresome conflicts with them.

--Molobo (talk) 20:27, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Regarding Piotrus and me/mentorship

I see that a lot of people try to connect me with Piotrus. I would like to reply once again, that I am not his personal friend. And neither do I share his interests on Wiki-Lithuania, Kresy, Piłsudski are not a main focus of my interest. Personaly I find the attention by Piotrus or others towards Polish hisotry in Lithuania counterproductive. They are far more important Polish-related topics on Wiki that need work IMHO, although sometimes they are issues that need to be solved in this area. But everybody has its own priorities. As to mentorship I was recently restricted after an incident by Moreschi and he can be contacted if need arises.--Molobo (talk) 13:45, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Bottom line

Dubious and selective sourcing can be problematic, but I can see no easy solution to this, and would require seperate process. Easier to eliminate is the incivility question, which in my view poisons Wikipedia to huge degree. If editors feel hurt by associations with organisations or views they don’t want to be associate with, they should also review how their edits could be seen by others. I will adress some general issues later If I will find time. --Molobo (talk) 18:01, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Evidence presented by User:Vecrumba

Irpen accuses others of conduct he practices himself

"Tendentious" editing

To me, Irpen's most infamous contention is his regarding the Baltic States, that the term "occupation" with regard to Soviet actions in the Baltic States is "judgemental" (some leeway prior to the end of WWII, no leeway in "judgemental" afterward), including classic unsupported editorial contentions such as that countries cannot simply not be "occupied" for 50 years. No matter how many sources were produced, representing them as saying the Soviets invaded and occupied (that is, using the words in the sources), was "tendentious." Diffs are not an issue, the only point here is that (may be a slight paraphrase of Irpen) perfectly sourced articles can still "cherry pick" sources, producing a "tendentious" article.

This was my first clash with Irpen.

Let us jump ahead to Holodomor, and article in which Irpen has a great personal interest, and on which, by my count, Irpen has done nearly 400 edits in the last four years, leading all other editors by a substantial margin. I added some additional information, sourced, which went well.

Some time later I was disturbed, however, by a sentence in the article that "Documentary evidence confirms the cases when the Soviet leadership expressed even personal interest in ensuring the aid distribution.", referencing Davies and Wheatcroft: "^ On April 6, 1933, Sholokhov, who lived in Vesenskii district, wrote at length to Stalin describing the famine conditions and urging him to provide grain. Stalin received the letter on April 15, and on April 16 the Politburo granted 700 tons of grain to the district. Stalin sent a telegram to Sholokhov "We will do everything required. Inform seize of necessary help. State a figure." Sholkhov replied on the same day, and on April 22, the day on which Stalin received the second letter, Stalin scolded him, "You should have sent answer not by letter but by telegram. Time was wasted" Davies and Wheatcroft, p. 217"

I did not have the Davies and Wheatcroft text, however, I did find a book review which observed (from D&W): "Unlike Sholokhov’s, many pleas for assistance, including those from Party Secretaries in Ukraine, were rejected." This clearly indicated Stalin's "personal" interest was only Sholokhov, not a general interest in the starving populace. I adjusted the article wording to reflect the situation appropriately. At that point:

• I was thereupon reverted by Grafikm_fr (another editor of past conflict), "per objection on talk". There was no explicit objection, more of a question by Jo0doe (see archived exchange here).
• An anon IP (in Portugal) un-reverted Grafikm_fr's revert
• Kubam Kazak re-reverted
• and Alex Bakharev fixed the spelling of the reverted original which I attempted to change

I recognized the editors as ones that would continue to block my change and was not in a mood for a revert war. And so it remained.

However, the discussion opened again roughly a month later when Riurik took issue with the Davies and Wheatcroft reference quoted, opening a new article discussion section. (I was unaware at the time that Riurik's posting was the result of an article editing run-in with Irpen prior that same day. Diffs are not material.)

After an exchange by Irpen and Ruirik, I re-inserted my original edit from a month earlier. This time, Irpen reverted, commenting: "please don't add info to the sentence referenced to a source that is just not there", and continuing on talk:

• Vecrumba, your own edit was unacceptable. I hope it is clear why from my edit summary. --Irpen 00:11, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

I countered that Irpen's revert was unfounded and that I'd track down the original source, to which Irpen replied at length...

• "Moreover, singling out the Sholokhov case makes this look like fulfilling the request was exceptional. I don't have to agree or disagree with this information because, luckily, your edit claims that it is supported by the source, Davies, p. 217. If you have ever seen the book you claim is your source, you would know that the issue is not discussed at a single page but the book devotes an entire section to the subject."
• But that's not all. Your claim that Davies uses the Sholokhov example to make a point that it was exceptional is not supported by Davies himself. I went back to the book and reread the whole chapter "Grain in the Time of Famine, February-July 1933" were the whole issue is discussed, they make up pp. 204-230 of the 2004 edition ISBN 0333311078. In fact the book gives a great deal of info. Some calls for aid were fulfilled, some were rejected, both for seed and for food grain. It was a mixed bag rather than the picture you try to paint referring to Davies. I will expand the the article now and you, in turn, please do not try to misquote sources in the future. [my emphasis in all cases]

Not having the book, but being sure I was not "trying to paint a picture" and (deliberately) "misquoting" sources, I had little option but to shell out a substantial amount of money and buy the D&W text. And what did I find? Lo and behold, D&W explicitly state Sholokhov was an exceptional case, only they do so on the next page. Furthermore, what I wrote as representing D&W had been EXACTLY what they said.

So, what is it that happened here? Irpen read the entire chapter and came to a different conclusion than expressly stated by the authors themselves in the very same chapter and denounced my accurately representing the author's summary of the situation as stated by themselves as misrepresenting the source.

Postscriptum

Some months later, during a lengthy thread on my user talk, Irpen did note with respect to comments I made again in that thread regarding the above that "I can't comment on the entire essay, just several points. I have the book. If Vecrumba wanted to see it, he did not need to spend $100. He could have just asked, most of the relevant info is between pp. 204 and 230. Not too much to scan and share but, obviously, cannot be publicly posted. Vecrumba's edit was factually false,..." [my emphasis]

Of course I responded that it's not possible to be more correct than to repeat the author's conclusions regarding the facts they represent as opposed to someone else's personal conclusions regarding the same facts.

When we construct a narrative from secondary sources, we cannot take it upon ourselves to state what those sources say in any way other than in which it was originally stated. Irpen puts himself above other editors and even above authors themselves in representing sources. Any representation at odds with his, even repeating the authors' conclusions regarding their own materials in the very chapter being discussed virtually verbatim, is "factually false."

And so, shall we simply continue to tolerate editors such as Piotrus to be attacked for their brazen, accurate representations of reputable sources? —PētersV (talk) 04:12, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Response to M.K.

Regarding "On heated dispute on Dubingiai massacre Piotrus became the only editor who made major revision of article [366], after invitee appearance nor without consent of involved parties nor, I think, without approval of invitee (perhaps invitee change his opinion now), despite the fact that reconciliation project (never finished) was started to find consensus among editors not to impose preferred and single POV,as Piotrus did."
   Knowing my WP actually worked its way up through central Europe into the Baltics (they were not my first major WP involvement), Piotrus was the editor who actually contacted me to assist with the impasse on the article. We made good progress, unfortunately, owing to personal circumstances, my work on that reconciliation has been on hold. The point is, regardless of the highly contentious nature of the article—contentiousness borne of the reputable sources used, NOT OF PERSONAL POV—I can personally vouch for every editor involved there that they were acting in editorial good faith.
   However, on WP, there are numerous editors, it would appear M.K. among them, who would take disagreement first as an indication of bad faith, second, as... well... it's only downhill from the first. —PētersV (talk) 04:29, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Response to Boodlesthecat

Regarding: "I will, as the Bible instructs us, assume good faith." To the complete contrary, I found my discussion with Boodlesthecat on my talk page to be increasingly disturbing, culminating in what I took as at least two attempts by Boodlesthecat to paint me as an anti-Semite. The entire thread in question is available here. In mine and other interchanges, I found Boodlesthecat to evidently be quite capable of assuming bad faith and of haranguing editors apparently waiting for them to make some expression of exasperation which can then be turned around and used to attack them. —PētersV (talk) 04:55, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Boodlesthecat demonizes editors who disagree with his edits

Boodlesthecat's haranguing of editors with charges of antisemitism continues to escalate. We now have an entire new section on his talk page demonizing Piotrus accusing him of "yet more Jew baiting." Assume good faith? Anyone hear of that lately? These incessant and escalating shrieks of anti-Semite have completely poisoned the possibility of any rational discussion regarding any article involving Polish-Jewish relations where Boodlesthecat involves himself. —PētersV (talk) 23:22, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Root cause

This is not about new issues regarding editors--as has been noted, there are once again so many familiar faces spouting their familiar rhetoric--it is about what I have described here as the WP Cold War. —PētersV (talk) 22:24, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

I would note that there are editors I have not dealt with before, e.g., Boodlesthecat. If anything, his/her contentions are even more virulent than those I have run across in the past. —PētersV (talk) 23:39, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Response to Irpen's evidence against Martintg

Irpen brings up as evidence:

The uninvolved admin who cleaned up the mess with redirects and unscorched that move commented: "Martintg moved, blanked the redirect, and recreated precisely the same, all within one minute after moving, and he did the same thing, systematically, on two separate moved pages. That does look like he knew very well what he was doing, and it certainly had nothing to do with the confusion about capitalization."(diff)

Unfortunately, Irpen presents admins and their comments as the alpha and omega regarding Wikipedian editorial behaviors, completely ignoring that there are admins that firmly support his "side" while reacting with an unfavorable POV regarding the other side. There is, for example, Khoikhoi, with whom I've had run-ins more than once, including a case including Irpen and veiled and not-so-veiled threats against my continued ability to participate on Wikipedia. To Irpen's evidence above, Future Perfect at Sunrise is far from an "uninvolved admin," they are an admin with a clearly pro-Irpen, anti-Irpen-opponent tilt.

I support this statement with this evidence against Future Perfect at Sunrise's "uninvolvement" regarding Martintg (who I have found to be a reputable and upstanding editor). Here, Martintg asks a completely valid "Question about membership Guidelines" re: working group on ethnic and cultural edit wars) and is assaulted by Future Perfect at Sunrise with completely inappropriate, off the wall, baseless inflammatory accusations. Future Perfect at Sunrise is, as it appears, as partisan a participant to the events in the community involved here as is any other editor, rendering Future Perfect at Sunrise's judgement on Martintg's "bad faith" no more than a personal, partisan, opinion tarring Irpen's opposition with blanket bad-faith-itis. —PētersV (talk) 20:10, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Response to Irpen's "pleadings"

In my now years of experience with Irpen, I can't imagine Irpen "pleading" for anything unless he felt he didn't have the upper hand to lower the boom via a sympathetic admin or preach from up on high to arbcom with his advice. I am sorry to have to assume such gross bad faith on Irpen's part, but that he lobbies to ban Piotrus rather seals that verdict.

I take it therefore that Irpen's continued diatribe here means that his talks with Piotrus for arriving at a mutually agreeable solution have collapsed and we're back to full frontal assault. —PētersV (talk) 20:28, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Boodlesthecat views WP as a community of antagonism and confrontation, not association and contribution

This section Boodlesthecat added to their talk page after a block (appears above in the diff) speaks for itself on attitude, both in demonizing the WP community and in its dismissive attitude to sanctions resulting from Boodlesthecat's conduct. —PētersV (talk) 16:23, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Boodlesthecat can't resist continued accusations of bad faith even after blocks

Latest accusations, per the talk page for Żydokomuna essentially paint anyone who Piotrus believes might be interested in the article as a BAD FAITH "EDIT WARRIOR." As I noted in response, my own interest predates the current conflict. Moreover, good or bad faith is determined by the actions of an editor once they have been made aware of an article. Good or bad faith on the part of an editor is not determined by accusations best summarized as "you're only here to be part of the army being recruited by XYZ to oppose me."
   There's no need for these continued strident self-centered "I'm shocked at your gall" attacks. This is an encyclopedia, not a platform to continually berate individuals. Prior blocks regarding such conduct are apparently inneffectual. —PētersV (talk) 16:27, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Irpen's request for extension

Before I launch into this evidence, I first want to note that I have nothing but respect for both Irpen and Piotrus on their command of materials having to do with Baltic/Central/Eastern/Soviet Europe. I also want to note that there are times that I disagree with Piotrus and agree with Irpen--a contention which I am sure will send some scurrying to find diffs as they would have expected the Earth to stop spinning on its axis.

As long as this sordid affair has gone on, I note that Irpen has asked for indulgence as he's still working on his findings and remedies. That an editor can spend at this point weeks and still require days to, as I have conclusively argued, complete creating a case to convict an editor based on what is ultimately circumstantial evidence, speaks volumes for what I can only interpret, based on my history of interactions with Piotrus, Irpen and observations of theirs, as the culmination of the personal and seeking to eradicate the editorial POV represented by Piotrus' voice and Piotrus' unwillingness to roll over dead for those that attack him mercilessly and, as repeatedly as it has been, vindictively, mission that Irpen has set out on, bent at all costs to use this opportunity to severely restrict, ban, or minimally strip of adminship (a red herring, Piotrus is open to recall at any time), Piotrus.

If Irpen offers remedies which apply to the entire Baltic/Central/Eastern European arena of conflict and which do not single out any particular editor, I will publicly and gladly retract this accusation of extreme bad faith. And so I offer this as an opportunity for Irpen to PROVE ME WRONG.

If we are as committed as we say we are to assume and demonstrate good faith, then I submit that if it is taking days more for Irpen to complete his tome, and this will be a tome seeking to punish Piotrus based on an iron-clad yet ultimately circumstantial case, it is not an act being done in good faith and not an act done with the betterment of Wikipedia as its mission because Irpen will have spent far far more time on working to crucify Piotrus than to arrive at a mutually agreeable solution to their WP:RELATIONSHIP.
   I am sorry, but when I have corresponded with Piotrus on our disagreements, we have, in the end, always had a dialog even if we agreed to disagree--and even then, taking care to note our positions, and doing so out of mutual respect and a sense of editorial equality. When I have corresponded with Irpen, I have always been left with the feeling that I've been lectured, that his POV is better than mine, that he is a superior keeper of the NPOV flame against debased nationalistic POV editing such as mine. No editor is superior on WP. (I'll spare you past diffs of Irpen giving advice to Arbcom or threatening users with Arbcom actions.)

If we really want to have peace in Baltic/Central/Eastern Europe, then I suggest that if Irpen comes back with sanctions against specific editors, that they also all be applied to Irpen. After all, isn't that what we do in edit wars? Punish both parties regardless of who started it to insure it doesn't happen again?

I am truly sorry for my increasingly dark interpretation of these proceedings and in particular of Irpen's purpose and motivations in participating here. There is only one course of action regarding Irpen's proposed remedies which would restore my--and I daresay that of an entire community of other editors'--respect for Irpen. I've laid that course out clearly. —PētersV (talk) 15:52, 17 October 2008 (UTC) Sorry for the typo on the edit summary

Only on WP is protesting an enforced LACK of content "ranting" and "uncivil accusations"

As evidenced here with regard to Żydokomuna, Boodlesthecat once again keeps ignoring the primary endemic issues with the article as it stands as the result of their contention that (a) Poles are "distinct" (Boodlesthecat's contention) in their antisemitic stereotyping (this is a WP:AGENDA) and (b) historical background as to the parade of antisemitic stereotypes linked in even the remotest way (e.g., medieval well poisoning) is immaterial as that historical background is not about Żydokomuna. Nor, when it comes to Jewish Communists, the historical seed for Żydokomuna, may we indicate in a biography regarding such a Communist that they were Jewish. In a biography of Bonnie and Clyde, their ethnicity is not germane to their role in historical events. However, there are times when ethnicity is significant. MoS provides guidelines to assist in not adding superfluous information, not edicts that certain types of information are forbidden. This is a typical tactic to quote guidelines to delete pertinent material when pursuing an editorial agenda. Boodlesthecat seeks to suppress historical background, and attempts to call them on that agenda are "uncivil." Suppress notable content, declare opposition uncivil, and respond with "if you don't like it go change Wikipedia" instead of discussing the content problem they have created and seek to perpetuate. Just a few reverts and edits:

• "restores chronological" order, no it mentions antisemitic stereotypes without tying them to Żydokomuna; Boodlesthecat moves it from where I placed it with other conspiratorial stereotypes and deletes that the stereotypes mentioned extended beyond Poland in line with Poland is "distinct" agenda
• reverts without comment that Jews were a significant bloc within the Communist ranks (can't have any mention of historical roots of stereotypes, only hate for Jews need apply)--yet it's OK to cite Schatz elsewhere in the article when it's not in conflict with the anti-Polish agenda
• that there even were Jewish Communists is "Jew-baiting" per edit summary
• here Żydokomuna is originated as a "concept" in 1817, on one person's piece of paper which did not see the light of day and could not affect public opinion until 1858, and even then Żydokomuna couldn't be a term or "concept" because Bolshevism didn't yet exist.

I'm sorry, but with regard to the last point, it's a sad fact that stereotypes of Jewish control and manipulation of society are not new. That someone writes a "what it would look like in Poland" is the perpetuation of the old stereotype, not creation of a new one. Żydokomuna could not exist in any way shape or form before Jewish communism, which is what it is. Yet in Poland, according to Boodlesthecat, Jewish communism existed in "concept" a century before it came into being. If you want to see an article turned into a coatrack, look no further. There's no content dispute, only anti-Polish agenda pushing quashing essential historical context. —PētersV (talk) 06:17, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Evidence presented by Xx236

Language used by Boodlesthecat

"Some people think all Poles are stupid. But actually thats exaggerated--that perception comes from the fact that a small number of Poles were noticed to be stupid." in Talk:Controversies of the Polish–Soviet War

Commentary moved to Wikipedia talk:Requests for arbitration/Piotrus 2/Evidence#Moved from "Language used by Boodlesthecat". Daniel (talk) 16:14, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Answer to User:Novickas

I understand "Yes, as the history has shown, Germany and Russia proven to be true great friends of the Lithuanian nation, indeed." [578] as ironic. I don't know if there are limitations of irony in the Wikipedia. Xx236 (talk) 16:08, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Evidence presented by User:Dr.Dan

A Change of Behavior Would Be Helpful

Although Piotrus has invited us all to his future ArbComs in 2009 and 2010, they need not have to happen. All that is necessary is that he makes some honest adjustments to his behavior on English Wikipedia. It's really not that hard to do. Personally, I'm trying to lead by my own example. I've made the change. So can he. As for these proceedings, it would be a good idea if Piotrus and "friends" took a harder look at some of the claims being made, instead of trying to alleviate his sins by turning the table on others as he and they like to do. A defense of so and so did this last year, or so and so said this or that two or three years ago, is no excuse for an administrator to behave in the manner that he does today, and now, and relentlessly so. If he is capable of putting a little of his ego aside and removing his mantle of the "Prokonsul" for just a little while, and do some honest soul searching, the WP project would would be a lot better off because of it. There was a time when so many of the people involved in these matters behaved less acrimoniously towards one another than they do now. One of the major problems is that these arbitrations never seem to take steps to curb the behavior that leads up to them. The old saying ..."where there's smoke there's usually fire" should come to mind when reviewing the fact that this is not Piotrus' first ArbCom. This is not a question of "enemies" who have been "gunning" for Piotrus for some time. I know that I do not consider myself Piotrus' enemy, and have a feeling that most of the persons involved in opposing Piotrus' behavior do not consider themselves at "war" with him or "enemies" of his either. Whether he contributes ten thousand articles to WP, or ten articles, has nothing to do with the issues at hand, nor does it give give him license to use WP as a Battleground or as a propaganda springboard, because if interspersed with the Chicken War and Zydokomuna (only two of his many contributions to WP) he intends to use the project to insult, and denigrate others and inflame by virtue of his edits on the main space and his "contributions" on the talk pages, as in the Vilnija article and the Holocaust in Lithuania (to name a few), the ArbCom committee should truly try to weigh all of the evidence and diffs that have been presented very carefully.

The Strange Case of the Prokonsul and User:Molobo

If anything should have raised a red flag long ago concerning the administrator, P.K. aka P.P., it was his association with Molobo. It's not that easy to get banned for a year from WP, yet Molobo managed to do it. His relentless flaming and uncivil behavior brought about a year long block. Prior to this development, Piotrus did very little to curb his behavior and in fact made it a point to unblock him over and over again during this period. Mind you this was during a time when Piotrus was concurrently clamoring against "uncivil" behavior and either blocking or asking uninvolved administrators to block others for behavior much less vitriolic than that of user: Molobo. But the year-long ban expired and Molobo returned. Then the "icing on the cake". After a short period of "good behavior" Molobo returned to his old modus operandi and got himself banned from the project permanently as in" forever". Even though the community consensus on Molobo was "enough is enough" (someone even went so far as to say "Good Riddance"), Piotrus used his abilities to have Molobo, who he himself called a problematic editor, reinstated. Very strange indeed, considering Piotrus' efforts to claim to abhor such behavior and would threaten to block, block, or ban people for the very behavior that Molobo was banished from the project.

A Final Note

I truly do not understand Piotrus' "defense" that his negative behavior is largely affected and influenced by, and due to "tag teams" that oppose him. I suppose that he thinks that no one considers the "tag team" of Piotrus, Molobo, Nihil novi/Logologist, Space Cadet, Greg park avenue, Tymek, Xx236, Poeticbent, Darwinek, Appleseed, Beaumont, Alden Jones, Halibutt, or Lysy, just to name a few of his supporters, to be such an entity. More importantly, questioning why the same parties involved in his previous ArbCom or in other previous disputes with him proves anything other than he continues to act as they claim is a little humorous. It would hardly be likely to find editors involved with other subjects than those where his behavior is in question to be involved in a proceeding like this. Quoting P.P., "One would expect if I am the problem I would attract more criticism." Sorry, but you are deserving of the criticism by the people that you continue to do battle, goad, and relentlessly pursue (stalk?). In the past I feel I over did it with zealous editing, and after carefully looking over my own behavior, made a decision to personally make an effort to change my ways. If you cannot do it yourself, it's time for this ArbCom to help you make some changes in your behavior. It's bad enough when an editor behaves in such a fashion, but unconscionably so when an administrator does. Dr. Dan (talk) 16:17, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

{Write your assertion here}

Place argument and diffs which support the second assertion; for example, your second assertion might be "So-and-so makes personal attacks", which should be the title of this section. Here you would show specific edits where So-and-so made personal attacks.

Evidence presented by Tymek

While I have not been as active as Piotrus and thus have not been the target of as much harassment, I not only agree with his observations (as I've indicated elsewhere), but have become occasionally harassed myself by the same users who harass him. In addition to groundless accusations that I am one of Piotrus cabal henchment (just search for my name in evidence here), the following diffs on non-ArbCom pages show bad faith with regards to my person and defamation of my name:

• [579]: good illustration of Boody's "I have no POV" attitude and veiled accusation of antisemitism after which I left the discussion
• [580]: "(Piotrus and) Tymek are standing reality and history on its head, by trying to place the blame for "źydokomuna" on Jews"
• [581]: "Tymek... your own attempts to make this entry into a vehicle for anti-semitic libels."

I know that those two diffs look tiny compared to the huge evidence sections presented by other users, but I simply don't have the time to spend on those proceedings (and like Piotrus, I prefer to write content - I've just recently crossed the threshold of 50 DYKs, and it's much more fun than participating in those proceedings). Unfortunately, my desire to keep contribution to this project is evaporating, as facing accusations of antisemitism and such is NOT FUN. A fellow editor, Radeksz, recently withdrew from an article after he was flamed enough: [582]. I am honestly afraid to rejoin that discussion - the above flames at me make me just as afraid to interact with Boodlesthecat and his friends as Radeksz is now, I just haven't posted my "I am leaving this discussion" message yet.

Oh, and I'd like to stress the importance of Piotrus evidence on why other editors have left (the project, not the discussion): Halibutt, Balcer, Lysy, Beaumont... they were subject to similar flaming from others (I was flamed by other editors here, too, not only by Boodlesthecat - I just have no time and will to look for all the diffs), gave up and left. I am slowly reaching the point of giving up myself (and how on earth Piotrus managed to survive years of that is beyond me). Tymek (talk) 20:50, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Evidence presented by Cla68

I've interacted with Piotrus in the past through the A-class review forum [583] in WP:MILHIST. I have observed that he generally generates quality content. I have not observed him overly push POV or be unwilling or unable to compromise in content disputes. A few examples:

• Piotrus, as primary editor, nominated Armia Krajowa for A-class review in March 2008. MILHIST participants, including myself found that the article met the A-class criteria, including format, completeness, and NPOV. Shortly thereafter, some edit warring apparently took place in the article with some accompanying debate on the article's talk page, starting here [584]. Looking through that debate, it appears that several of the involved editors, several of whom are mentioned on this evidence page, are trying to add or change some of the content of the article, some of which might be interpreted as POV-pushing. But, I don't see Piotrus, as the primary editor of the article and who had done most of the work to take it to its advanced state, acting unreasonably.

• Piotrus, as primary editor, nominated Kiev Expedition (1018) for A-class review in August 2008. Again, the article was found to meet the A-class criteria, including NPOV. Again, a significant content dispute broke out shortly thereafter [585]. Although Piotrus defends his editing, he again does not appear to act unreasonably to attempts to change the content of the article in what may or may not be POV-pushing by other editors.

Reviewing those content debates, it does appear that Piotrus does lean to some degree towards one particular POV. Piotrus, however, is the primary editor behind 25 articles successfully nominated for Featured Article (FA), 19 of which remain at FA status. The FA process is fairly rigorous, and if Piotrus was engaged in POV-pushing, I believe that this would have been caught and would have prevented many, if not most, of those articles from reaching FA status. In my opinion, therefore, Piotrus does not generally allow any POV he might have from preventing him from greatly improving the articles that he edits and editing within policy. I'll leave it up to the Committee to decide if this holds true for the other editors who have opposed him in content disputes in the involved articles. Cla68 (talk) 02:30, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Evidence formally presented here by Dc76 (although found not by him)

I moved it to the talk page because the evidence is circumstancial. Dc76\^talk 04:21, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

I recommand this. Dc76\^talk 07:31, 18 October 2008 (UTC)