Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal/Cases/2008-07-25 Comfort women

Wikipedia Mediation Cabal
Status	new
Request date	06:45, 25 July 2008 (UTC)
Requesting party	Unknown

[[Category:Wikipedia Medcab new cases|]][[Category:Wikipedia medcab maintenance|]]

Request details

Who are the involved parties?

• Caspian blue (talk · contribs)
• Good friend100 (talk · contribs)
• Flying tiger (talk · contribs)
• Future Perfect at Sunrise (talk · contribs)

What's going on?

I would like to enter into meditation regarding the conduct of Caspian blue (talk · contribs) on Korean-Japan and Korea-Japan WWII related topics following a failed attempt on their talk page.

In my opinion, Caspian blue is engaged in a long term strategy of WP:OWNership over the current poor state of such topics and their pattern of identical reversion are being followed by others. It is not too much to state that the revisions hold a Korean nationalistic/anti-Japanese POV and are being used to maintain the topics in a poor or limited state.

The user maintains a watchlist of such topics and many of their edits appear to contain assumptions of a conspiracy by other editors, we presume to be Japanese.

To me, Caspian blue appears to have a modus operandi that could best be summarised by;

• revert, provoke, complain, report

and their reversions are then further identically copied by other editors.

I flag up such strategies as

• exaggerated or dishonest edit summaries, overly extensive edit summaries or contributions designed to flag up editors to likeminded supporters on a nationalistic basis,
• copy and pasting of private messages onto topic articles so as to prejudice or distract others and refusal to actually discussion issues,
• persistent tagging of other editors' talk pages with warnings and threats, deliberately provocative repeated revisions,
• generally exaggerated discussions to cause distraction, the use of crapflood to distract from meaningful discussions and so on.

In short, a fairly successful strategy to discourage others from editing "their" topics or shut out editors who might threaten their POV which includes wasting them time by having to fill out requests such as this one! One which takes advantage of admin's limited time and energy.

I approached the user on their talk pages to discussion this issue as it is obviously an overly-personal one relating to race and nationality that is now damaging the wikipedia and discouraging others from contributing on topics that, quite frankly, need a lot of work.

One would have to be naive not to relate this modus operandi to the ongoing nature of regional politics in Asia involved. My feeling is that it is irresponsible, given the sensitivity of the topics, and a quite deliberate waste of other editors' time, effort and goodwill. Both are damaging to the wikipedia.

• I would like to flag up the deeply concerning behaviour of the admin Future Perfect at Sunrise making considerable threats in support of Caspian blue's fairly obvious pattern of behaviour, see here.

What would you like to change about that?

I think that Caspian blue ought to have some time out from editing on contentious Korean related topics and that such topic should be allowed to develop and improve without users facing the gauntlet of anti-Japanese sentiments. My feeling is that Caspian blue has over-personalised the issues their are obviously not old enough to experienced themselves and, perhaps, having been through wikipedia conflicts in the past are still living them out. I note that there seem to be consistent Korean (or Korean-American) sympathies exhibited on user talks pages and through edits which I would say we cannot exclude as being a background to seeking to denigrate the Japanese or skewing POVs.

I would like to ask Caspian blue to address this issue of Korean interests, how it reflects on their editing of Japanese-Korean related topics and how it encourages others to copy them and encourage them to maintain a more honest and impartial approach to the wikipedia.

• Specifically, I would like a second opinion on the nature of Future Perfect at Sunrise's threat given their privileged position as an admin and given that it hints at their ability to use others to do their dirty work.

nb: I am not Asian. I do not speak any Asian language. I have never denied any war time atrocity (... and I promise that I do not wish to restore the Emperor of Japan and invade Korea!).