User talk:Elonka

Two quotes in one day

You made my quotes! Two new favorite quotes added in one day is a real record (; [1] ——Martin^phi ☎ Ψ Φ—— 01:58, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks.  :) One of my own favorite quotes these days is by (now-retired) arbitrator Paul August: "For me, contributing to Wikipedia is a noble act. Knowledge is power. We can all feel justifiably proud that the words we are helping to write, will help to empower untold millions of people, all over the world. However Wikipedia is not a perfect world. There are plenty of people, who go out of their way to attack and disrupt, more of us need to go out of our way to cherish and support. It is probably not enough for us to simply be polite, reasonable and constructive. We need to do more. We need to actively cultivate, nurture and sustain our fellow editors."[2] --Elonka 04:37, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Repeated BLP violations at Nahum Shahaf

Elonka, User:PalestineRemembered is repeatedly insterting the same BLP violation (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3ANahum_Shahaf&diff=237681605&oldid=235860520) that you had sanctioned warned User:Nickhh for about, at the Talk page of Nahum Shahaf, and the talk page of Muhammad al-Durrah. This user is supposed to be editing under the guidance of a mentor, per restrictions placed on him by the ecommunity, but since his most recent ANIcase, he seems to be editing without one. Canadian Monkey (talk) 16:18, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Elonka, perhaps you could remind this editor that a) you did not ban me, it was another admin, although you did support the ban; and b) the ban was not for any BLP violation, but for supposedly edit-warring (with oddly, yourself and this editor, but let's ignore that for now). I think this is the third time he has turned up on various pages to make the latter accusation, along with accusations that I am a "disruptive editor" eg here, which is hardly backed up by the overall pattern of my editing. It seems to be little more than rather pointless muckspreading. I don't normally come bleating to administrators, but since CM seems to make a habit of coming here to make complaints about me, I thought it only fair that I say something in response. I know you are concerned in particular about civility issues. --Nickhh (talk) 16:52, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Nickhh, this is not about you, but about PR. Your coming here gives the impression that you are stalking me, or monitoring my contributions - please don't do that. And finally, since you have repeated this flase claim elswhere, let's set the record straight: You were banned for, among other things, BLP violations, as User:Coren clearly indicated : 'you have persisted despite numerous warnings and expressed BLP concerns.' Canadian Monkey (talk) 17:01, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Lots of people know about this claim you're making against me, because, by pure good fortune, I spotted what you were saying here and I have informed everyone on my "I'll help but don't use my name in public" list. In the light of various intemperate behaviors, I was waiting for their response before defending myself. In the meantime, I would be happy to replace "conspiracy theorist" with "the fountainhead of al-Dura conspiracy mania" if that would pacify you. PR^talk 17:16, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

What to you mean by "by pure good fortune, I spotted what you were saying"? I made this comment as a repsonse to your own post, on that very page, a few hours earlier. I meant for you to see it, and asked you a question, which I will repeat again: who is your current mentor, as required by your editing restrictions? Canadian Monkey (talk) 17:40, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

I looked into the complaints, and note that PalestineRemembered is not putting BLP violations into articles, but that there may be some "grey area" in terms of what's being said on talkpages. BLP does indeed has a little bit of leeway on talkpages, since sometimes it is necessary to talk about a term, in order to decide whether or not the sources are solid enough to include it in an article. So, for now, I've added the {{NOINDEX}} tag to Talk:Nahum Shahaf to keep it off the search engines, and I think it's reasonable to allow discussions to continue for a bit longer. Then later on, we can potentially courtesy-blank the relevant sections, depending on how the discussions go. See also Talk:Nahum Shahaf#BLP. --Elonka 22:21, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Hello Elonka - the deeper I look at every part of the other article, the more I'm alarmed by the BLP issue. It states (our words, not a quote): "The "maximalist" narrative asserted that the entire incident had been a hoax staged for propaganda purposes, that the footage did not show al-Durrah being killed, and that the affair had been concocted as a "prime-time blood libel"[87] by Charles Enderlin, the cameraman, the al-Durrahs and other Palestinian and Arab parties. [10] Enderlin and others have criticized this view as a conspiracy theory.[70][31]", referenced to #87 "Glick, Caroline. "Prime-time blood libels". Jerusalem Post, October 24, 2006", #10 "Schwartz, Adi. "In the footsteps of the al-Dura controversy", Haaretz, 8 November 2007.", #70 "Zlotowski, Michel. "French TV channel sues for libel over death of Palestinian boy in 2000". Jerusalem Post, 14 September 2006" and #31 "Israeli, Palestinian Soldiers Exchange Fire in Gaza." Xinhua News Agency, September 30, 2000".

Now, only one of these reports (ref #10, Haaretz "footsteps") is on the web and verifiable. But it adds nothing to the parts of the story to which it is referenced - it has no "libel" (let alone "blood-libel"), no "concocted" (or "concoctions"), no "parties" (Palestinian, Arab or other), no "al-Duras" (let alone "al-Durrahs") - and not even any "cameraman"!. While it uses "maximalist", it actually says "in the blogosphere, the "maximalist version" developed". The only mention of "hoax" is a direct quote of Karsenty, and the article practically dismisses it eg "two senior French journalists, Denis Jeambar and Daniel Leconte, leveled harsh criticism at Enderlin and his story. ... 'he had no possibility of determining that he was in fact dead, and even less so, that he had been shot by IDF soldiers.' At the same time, the two noted explicitly that, 'We do not share the opinion that the incident was staged.'"

Under these circumstances, it would appear that parts of the article have been deliberately written as a BLP violation that has no basis in the verifiable record (and quite possibly, no basis whatsoever). The word "hoax" appears 5 times, including in the lead, in an article that almost looks as if it was written in order to ring alarm bells about journalist integrity in every reader. Yet our article barely mentions the word "blog" (2 out of 3 cases in the article section "Other libel cases" - while the Haaretz article above (just as an instance) uses "blogosphere" 3 times and "blogger" once.

This article is picked up elsewhere in the project, eg top of a list of "extreme examples of controversial reporting", so any BLP offense is becoming multiplied. (Needless to say, all this makes it even odder that I'm being threatened with being dragged over the coals for replacing "the fountainhead of al-Dura conspiracy mania" with "conspiracy theorist" in a comment on a TalkPage).

I've previously argued for administrative action on the TalkPage - it now looks as if it's even more urgent at the article. If, as it would appear, there have been editors recklessly using the article to publish a BLP (with references that are at least partly falsified), then I must look to someone at a higher pay-grade than myself to suggest what to do about it. PR^talk 09:00, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Elonka, as requested, can you please explain to this editor that I was not banned for BLP violations. This is in effect an implicit accusation that I have been committing libel via my contributions here. It is simply not true, the ban was very specifically for supposed edit warring, as explained in full here. Selectively quoting the ban notification as CM has done above, from the part where it separately mentions BLP "concerns" - which existed but which were a matter of genuine dispute - is borderline dishonest. And no CM I have not been following your contributions - you clearly have been following mine though, for example suddenly turning up on this article to revert some of my basic tidying up and appearing here out of the blue after another editor dropped me a note on my talk page asking me to help out with it. Please find me any article dealing with unrelated issues where I have suddenly turned up after apparently following you there. To suggest that if I notice when you are spreading falsehoods about my editing I cannot respond and ask you to correct the misinformation you are putting about without being accused of stalking you, seems a little odd. I will admit that I do keep an eye on what you say in relation to the Durrah stuff, but that is simply because you seem to have chosen to launch some kind of campaign against me, taking every opportunity to accuse me of being a BLP-violator, disruptive editor or whatever across several talk pages.

On the BLP issue itself, I think we need some clarity. We are not talking about accusations of wrong doing based on poor sourcing, for example sourcing a claim that "Mr X is guilty of fraud" to an internet blog. An attempt was made to include information that an individual was described in a certain way, which could be seen as negative, in one or more mainstream newspaper comment pieces. That information was properly attributed, rather than being included on the WP page as if it were a statement of fact. As far as I know there are no legal proceedings in hand against either paper on account of the columns. Let's take an equivalent example from a current and more high profile situation - would it be a BLP violation to include in the Barack Obama/Sarah Palin articles that "he/she has been described by [a writer] in the Washington Post as lacking the necessary experience to be President/Vice-President"? In my view it would be pretty hard to make that claim. --Nickhh (talk) 09:29, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm wondering why the numerous accusations that have been made against Charles Enderlin and Jamal al-Durrah by various POV-pushers have been ignored. I got involved in this mess in the first place because of the chronic BLP violations that were going on without any remedy. In the case of Enderlin, it's far more of a pressing concern than anything that might have been said about Shahaf - might I remind you all that the accusations against Enderlin are the subject of ongoing libel litigation? -- ChrisO (talk) 22:54, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

User:Dark Tea

Fine, feel free to rescind the topic ban. Because in that case the only realistic options I can see are (a) to restore Moreschi's block, or (b) as I said, to assign a mentor. Are you volunteering? Black Kite 19:45, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for riding roughshod over that topic ban, despite the consensus at ANI that this is a tendentious editor. From now on, I shall expect you to be watching all of this editor's work, and reverting all of his problematic edits. Black Kite 22:15, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Black Kite, FYI, you cannot just issue a no-notice topic ban, on your say-so. Topic bans need either backing from an ArbCom case (which does not apply to this situation), or a clear community consensus. Even if there was an ArbCom case, then it would still require a formal warning to the user beforehand, and then logging the ban to the ArbCom case page. And if the ban was approved by community consensus, then you need to diff the proof of the discussion to the user's talkpage. As near as I can tell, you did none of these things.[3] Also, the main problem that I have with Moreschi's block, is that he issued a 3-month block against a longtime contributor, without ever posting a single warning to the contributor's talkpage, and even though Moreschi was actively editing in the same topic area. Now, I'm willing to keep an eye on Dark Tea's edits, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to be following along behind them and reverting, especially since I am not familiar with the topic area. I will, however, be interested to see if editors who are familiar with the topic area, can provide specific proof of policy violations. What exactly did Dark Tea do? Did he add unsourced information? Use unreliable sources? Misinterpret information from reliable sources? Delete citations for no good reason? Edit an article in violation of talkpage consensus? Ignore the results of an RfC? Engage in edit wars? If so, please provide proof, as I'd be happy to take a look at it. --Elonka 22:30, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

So let me get this right - you unilaterally revoked that topic ban despite (a) not being aware of the problematic nature of his edits (b) clearly not having read the ANI thread, with its multiple example diffs, and (c) not being willing to revert his problematic edits? Thanks for that. I'd suggest you go and read the ANI thread now. Black Kite 22:34, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

I've read every single diff provided at the ANI thread, and I'm not seeing the problem. I do see cases where Dark Tea's writing style and formatting could be better, but I saw nothing blockworthy. Instead I saw Dark Tea being scrupulous about sourcing additions, and being equally careful about removing unsourced information. But, while looking deeper into this situation, here are some diffs that I did find, which are looking like abuse of administrator access: At Historical definitions of races in India, Moreschi came in on September 11 and did some copyediting, including deletion of a large chunk of the article, including deleting many citations to what appear to be reliable sources.[4] An hour later, Dark Tea reverted Moreschi.[5] A half-hour later, Moreschi reverted Dark Tea.[6] One minute later, Moreschi blocked Dark Tea for three months.[7] This is exactly what administrators are told not to do. Administrators simply should not be using administrator tools in situations where they are personally involved, and especially not to gain the advantage in a content dispute. Moreschi blocked an established contributor, with not a single warning to that user's talkpage. So, Black Kite, if you'd like to be indignant about something, you might want to start with Moreschi's actions, not those of Dark Tea. --Elonka 00:33, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

I am disinterested in Moreschi's actions here; my only concern is to try and prevent Dark Tea degrading any more of our articles, something which I would have though you would also have an interest in. If you seriously can't see the problematic nature of Dark Tea's edits - repeatedly adding confused commentary and theories, and spurious/irrelevant material, often with a dash of synthesis of quotations and sources - then I would suggest that you let others deal with this. Wikipedia:FTN#Caucasian_race, linked from that ANI thread, is useful as a basis of understanding for the scope and depth of the problem here; this quote is particularly relevant

• "Wikipedia is now coming of age ... and we finally need an admin population that can recognize rambling nonsense when they see it, and feel obliged to help cleaning it up rather than throwing up obstacles for those who do on grounds of a muddle-headed idea of neutrality and political correctness."

Black Kite 08:29, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Minster, Thanet

Just to allay your concerns, the BLP allegations were part of a complex series of semi-plausible (and not unamusing) vandalistic insertions by one user and some related IPs to a group of articles including this one. The give-away was the mention of the death penalty, abolished in Thanet many years ago. (One of those cases where subject knowledge came in handy, in short.) I have reverted back some way to the last apparently sensible version. Richard Pinch (talk) 21:49, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Supplement: a nice little edit war is brewing up on that page now. I'm wondering whether it might not be an attempt to get these allegations back in under cover of a load of other nonsense. You were probably right to focus in on that. Richard Pinch (talk) 10:39, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Looks like the article is getting some rapid expansion/cleanup, which is good. The editors are also focusing on using sources, which is excellent. My inclination is to stay out of it unless things get "stuck". I've got it added to my watchlist... If it looks like things get stalled and an admin's presence would be helpful, let me know. --Elonka 17:23, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Wikistalking and genuinely disruptive editing.

Elonka. This drive-by intervention, quite apart from suggesting that you are now following me around this place, was incredibly unhelpful. You have merely given encouragement to an editor who is is wandering through articles here deleting vast amounts of usually well sourced content in areas where he has absolutely no understanding of the issues at hand. I had suggested that what they were doing was close to vandalism (not vandalism per se) as a kind of informal warning to them, and you completely undermined that without even looking into the nature of the problem. Within an hour of your talk page post, that editor - who until that point had at least been held back and been engaged with great patience on the talk page - proceeded to gut the article with a series of 35 edits, mostly deletions of whole paragraphs and sections. Within ten minutes of finishing there, he moved on to another article and deleted the entire page in one edit. Admittedly the second page did have some citation issues, but this was clear-cut vandalism. Increasingly your actions as an admin seem to be more damaging than helpful. Not content with unilaterally maintaining what is now a perfectly stable page under continued extraordinary restrictions, without any attempt that I could see to consult any other, non-involved editors or admins (which could now last for as long as 6 months - unprecedented surely for an article that is not itself as an article generating off-wikipedia problems), you are now facilitating vandalism to other parts of the encyclopedia. Despite what you may think of my editing, most of what I do here is actually all about preventing this kind of damage, upholding WP policy and ensuring articles avoid glaring imbalance (when compared to reliable sources out in the real world). Perhaps you could assume good faith a little more? Thank you --Nickhh (talk) 09:13, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Nickhh, I have sympathy for the fact that you feel that you are dealing with a POV-pusher. There are ways to deal with such an editor, but calling them a vandal is not one of them. See WP:VANDAL#NOT. Instead, the most effective thing that you can do, is to prove, with diffs, that the alleged POV pusher is editing against consensus. Let me try and explain how things look to an intervening admin: When an admin comes in to a dispute and just sees two editors yelling at each other and both accusing each other of POV pushing, it's often difficult for the admin to tell who's in the "right" and who's in the "wrong". Especially when the truth is usually somewhere in the middle. Please also keep in mind that just because you're extremely familiar with another editor's contrib history, doesn't mean that an admin will be. An admin often arrives at a conflict, and sees editors saying things like, "Editor X is obviously a POV-pushing vandal! Just read their last 2,000 edits and you'll see what I mean!" But sorry, most admins just don't have time to spend hours researching every potential problem editor. To get an idea of how difficult this is, go to WP:ANI, pick an edit war thread at random that you know nothing about, and try to come up to speed rapidly and figure out what should be done. I think you'll quickly see that it's very difficult to wade into a topic area that you know very little about, with editor names that you don't recognize, articles you've never read, and sources that you're not familiar with, and try to figure out where "neutrality" is. That's why in many of these cases, admins simply protect the page and move on, rather than trying to sort out who's doing what.

Don't get me wrong: Most admins are open to taking administrative action on POV pushers, but for best results, you need to try and make their jobs as easy as possible, rather than requiring them to go trawling through everyone's contribs. Specific things that I personally like to see are actual diffs. For example:

• A diff of talkpage consensus, and a diff of the editor doing something which violated that consensus. Especially if such consensus is the result of an RfC.
• A diff of an editor inserting unsourced (and plausibly false) information
• A diff of an editor inserting apparently sourced information, that in actuality doesn't match up with the source that they're citing
• A diff of an editor removing citations to reliable sources
• A diff of an editor adding citations to (clearly) unreliable sources
• Diffs of an edit war (though remember, it takes two to edit war)
• Diffs of an editor repeatedly inserting BLP-violating information
• Diffs of an editor being uncivil, or commenting on contributors at an article talkpage, instead on engaging in good faith discussion about the article content.

I took a look at the diffs you provided, and have cautioned Raggz about page blanking. If there are further issues, or if you have diffs of anything else from the above list, let me know and I assure you that I'll take a look. Otherwise, I recommend proceeding to another step of Wikipedia:Dispute resolution, such as filing an article Request for comment, requesting mediation, or posting for help at a relevant noticeboard. Then once you've got RfC results, you may be able to provide a diff that will match that first bullet point I mentioned. Hope that helps, --Elonka 20:05, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

I'd thought about doing something more formal and detailed, but going to WP:ANI or wherever and compiling diffs seemed a very cumbersome way of dealing with something that was so obviously problematic (I honestly wouldn't have known where to start detailing all the problems anyway). I was hoping that rational debate and occasional blunt speaking, along with other editors coming in to reinforce the point, would solve the problem. I appreciate that admins or other editors casually coming across an apparent dispute often won't see quite how objectively off the wall one side of the argument is, but that's kind of my point of course, especially when that intervening editor seems to have a negative view of one the editors involved. --Nickhh (talk) 23:39, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Clarified recall parameters?

I noticed you're still in Category:Administrators open to recall. Have you considered posting a clearer recall criteria, or removing yourself from the category? –xeno (talk) 20:15, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I am planning to stay in the category, but update my recall criteria. Still wordsmithing off-wiki though. --Elonka 20:17, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

cheers, –xeno (talk) 20:21, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, Elonka, I've probably already mentioned this to you, but just in case I haven't: I think it's a good idea to look at Lar's recall procedure for ideas. ☺ Coppertwig (talk) 21:58, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I'm familiar with Lar's criteria. However, I find them far too complicated, and most other admins that I have spoken to about it, agree. What I'd like to end up with is something fairly simple and easy to understand, which does allow the community to ask for resignation if an admin becomes a problem, but doesn't allow frivolous requests. Because of the areas where I am participating in ArbCom enforcement, it's been made clear to me that some groups of editors will stop at nothing to get me out of "their" topic area. I'm not crazy about the idea of having to undergo a recall request or RfC each time I implement a discretionary sanction.

What I'm leaning towards is a set of recall criteria which require proof that an admin has repeatedly misused admin tools. For example, if an admin has repeatedly deleted articles where the deletions were overturned at DRV, or blocked editors where the blocks were overturned at ANI, or an admin issued ArbCom discretionary sanctions and those sanctions were repeatedly overturned on appeal, then it would be reasonable to assume that the community might have concerns as to whether or not that admin should continue to maintain administrator access, and a recall might be legitimate. But in a case where an administrator has not abused tools or access, a recall should probably not be possible. So, I'm looking through various other administrators' recall criteria, and thinking hard about the entire situation, and trying to decide what to write up for my own criteria. --Elonka 22:27, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

You might look at User:Pedro/Recall and User:MBisanz/Recall which have some twists other methods don't have. MBisanz ^talk 22:35, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! There's definitely some food for thought there... :) --Elonka 22:45, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

For example, if an admin deletes a large number of articles, they should be able to have a certain small proportion of them overturned at DRV without being considered abusing the tools (and if they delete a very large number of articles, that could work out to a large number of DRV overturns). If an admin deletes only a small number of articles, they should be allowed to make some mistakes as someone relatively inexperienced at deletion.

Re complicated procedures: as in legal documents, each complexity is there for a reason. If you leave them out, you have to be prepared to face situations that may arise without the benefit of procedures that were well-designed for those particular situations. ☺ Coppertwig (talk) 01:31, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Complaint against Elontra at the Administrators Board

I regret that this was necessary. My issues are listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard#Improper_and_unhelpful_intervention_by_Administrator_Elonka Raggz (talk) 22:22, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

This has been marked "resolved" by Jehochman with "Complaint has no merit, editor is suitably warned."[8]. ☺ Coppertwig (talk) 23:45, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your Suggestions on dealing with disputes at the Clarence Thomas biography

Wow, you seem to have a lot going on here. How exciting. I just wanted to thank you for your input. I read your suggestions and found them helpful. Before I read them I added two requests for editprotects, to alter false statements in the article (supported by verifiable sources like the government archive at the library of congress...) that have not been disputed on the talk page. Mostly I just wanted to thank you though, and also to let you know that I did an RFC. I think that's what's it's called. I know it's not KFC. Anyway, I'm not wearing a flak jacket, so I better head out... Good luck and have fun. Thanks again.(Wallamoose (talk) 01:05, 16 September 2008 (UTC)) Oops, so much for my RfC. I can't seem to get the formatting correct. (Wallamoose (talk) 03:17, 16 September 2008 (UTC))

Thanks for the kind words.  :) And yes, I'll take a look. Oh, and sorry about the RfC difficulties you've been having... We've been having discussions on making the bot a bit more user-friendly, but it's not quite there yet. Glad to see you got it figured out though.  :) --Elonka 06:16, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Recall criteria

While the standards are User:Elonka/Draft are tight, I think you can justify them based on the nature of work you are doing here. I only wish that you had thought about this before you marched into the "hot zone". Nevertheless, I am willing to mark our disagreements as historical, and work with you going forward when required. We both seem interested in many of the same areas of project space. As we will inevitably meet again, it would be best if we could be on cordial terms. Jehochman ^Talk 19:27, 17 September 2008 (UTC)