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Any editor is entitled to add evidence to this page, irrespective of whether they are involved in the dispute. Create your own section and do not edit another editor's section. Please limit your evidence to a maximum of 500 words and 50 diffs. It is more effective to make succinct, detailed submissions, and submissions of longer than 500 words are usually not as helpful (and may also be removed at any time). 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 Clerk without warning. Focus on the issues that are important to the dispute and on diffs which show the nature of the dispute.

You must use the prescribed format in your evidence. Evidence should include a link to the actual page diff in question, or to a short page section; links to the page itself are insufficient. Never link to a page history, an editor's contributions, or a log for all actions of an editor (as those change over time), although a link to a log for a specific article or a specific block log can be useful. Please make sure any page section links are permanent; see simple diff and link guide.

General discussion of the case will not be accepted on this page, and belongs on the talk page. The Arbitration Committee expects that all rebuttals of other evidence submissions will be included in your own section and will explain how the evidence is incorrect. Please do not refactor the page or remove evidence presented by others. If something is put in the wrong place, only an Arbitrator or Clerk may move it.

Arbitrators may analyze evidence and other assertions at /Workshop, which is open for comment by parties, Arbitrators, and others. After arriving at proposed principles, findings of fact, or remedies, Arbitrators vote at /Proposed decision. Only Arbitrators (and Clerks, when clarification on votes is needed) may edit the proposed decision page.

Evidence presented by Mike Cline

Current word length: 390; diff count: 0.

This is a pure and simple failure of WP policy

I routinely work on Requested Moves and have been extensively involved with WP:Title for several years (mostly monitoring the discussion but stepping in occassionaly on policy improvement discussions). I recently wrote this Holistic View of WP titles and this My ideal titling policy. Policy ought to be simple to apply and interpret, but over the last few years we've created a policy page that is nothing more than a bunch of conflicting Babel that is poorly interpreted, selectively interpreted, and under constant threat of change when one editor or another needs a bit of policy wording to support their pet ideas. So my first assertion is very clear, our titling policy is dysfunctional. My second assertion here, is that any bad behavior on the part of editors surrounding our titling policy is a direct result of the policy wording and its application. If any answer is the right answer and no answer is wrong and that can be supported by policy, then editors will eventually behave badly when they are trying to defend their little view of the world based on policy. Its complicated by the fact that 6 or 7 editors can agree on something over the objections of 4 or 5 others and claim Community Consensus for a community of 136,000 editors. Our titling policy has put our editors in impossible positions. --Mike Cline (talk) 15:35, 29 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

My solution reccomendation

The solution to this is simple but will take some work. We can't fix the dysfunctional policy overnight. But we can stem the bleeding. I strongly favor protecting the policy page from any edits for 1 year. I am pretty confident that if WP:Titles did not change one word for the next 365 days, WP would go on, and all the energy devoted to essentially meaningless policy debate, could be diverted to building the encyclopedia. I would also conduct an RFC that might run for many months in a very structured way to completely examine and reformulate our titling policy so that titles can be decided simply and with a holistic view. We will never be able to grow this encyclopedia from 3.9M articles to ~5-10M articles over the next decade if we don't fix the Babel we now call our titling policy. --Mike Cline (talk) 15:35, 29 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

One day, a disciple asked Confucius: “If a king were to entrust you with a territory which you could govern according to your ideas, what would you do first?” Confucius replied: “My first task would certainly be to rectify the names.” The puzzled disciple asked: “Rectify the names?…Is this a joke?” Confucius replied: “If the names are not correct, if they do not match realities, language has no object. If language is without an object, action becomes impossible - and therefore all human affairs disintegrate and their management becomes pointless and impossible. Hence, the very first task of a true statesman is to rectify the names.”

— The Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use

Our first task is to rectify the policy. --Mike Cline (talk) 15:56, 29 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Evidence presented by JCScaliger

Current word length: 451; diff count: 10.

In a sense, all our policies and guidelines lack meaning; but that is a philosophical position, not necessarily a help to ArbCom. The more practical distinction is between those who use WP:TITLE or WP:MOS as legislation which all must obey, and those who view it as a guideline. If both were indeed to be protected for a year, the first group might get bored and go away, and we could go on without them. [If Mike Cline's suggestion is moved to the workshop, please move these comments with it.]

A series of moves and move requests

Tony, Noetica, and Dicklyon have made a series of moves and recently.

{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 SMcCandlish

Current word length: 471; diff count: 0.

There's a concerted effort to impose ungrammatical capitalization in WP because the style is favored by some specialist publications

There's lots of evidence. Editors of all backgrounds and interest criticize the illiterate-looking capitalization of random nouns like bird species vernacular names, and the same dozen or so editors for seven years have recycled the same bankrupt rationalizations for it. When it's all boiled down it's simply an insistence of WP:ILIKEIT as more important than basic grammar and Wikipedia's credibility. So, here it is so far:

I've only gathered some of the evidence of this; there is much, much more to be found in the WT:BIRDS archives, and I haven't even started looking outside biology projects. The short version is that specialists often like to capitalize Things They Think Are Important, like that, in specialist publications. Ornithology journals mostly capitalize the recognized common names of birds. Almost all other biology journals don't capitalize common names, of anything. Legal concepts are often capitalized in legal writing ("The Party of the First Part", etc.) Legislators/parliamentarians love to capitalize things like "National Security" and "the Defen[s|c]e of the Nation" and so on. Computer geeks sometimes capitalize stuff too, in manuals ("Serial Port", etc.). Devotees of particular schools of thought tend to capitalize them in their insider writing ("Method Acting", etc.). None of this matters on Wikipedia, because Wikipedia is not a specialist publication. Any attempt by some special interest editor or pack of editors to alter the naming conventions or the Manual of Style to call for such capitalization does not represent consensus, just an editwarring, viciously tendentious minority. It's a violation of policy at WP:LOCALCONSENSUS, and my evidence also includes proof of blatant gaming of the system, namely near ownership of naming conventions like WP:FAUNA to subvert the clear wording of WP:LOCALCONSENSUS and to explicitly disagree with WP:MOS so that projects that want to ignore MOS feel they can do so with impunity and hide under the skirt of WP:FAUNA. Someone actually said this at WT:BIRDS - ignore MOS, we have WP:FAUNA and it protects us. It's a form of wikilawyering called "asking the other parent". It's nonsense and it has to stop. No other encyclopedia, dictionary, newspaper, etc., etc., etc., supports capitalization of random nouns. Only insider geek specialist publications like bird field guides and ornithology journals do it, and they even get criticized for it by insiders in their fields. Enough is enough. No more filibustering of MOS and the naming conventions by WikiProjects. The ArbCom has already spoken on this before, against both fait accompli behavior by projects, and projects going "renegade" and making up their own rules and ignoring the broader consensuses behind our policies and guidelines. In short, the ArbCom is barking up the wrong tree. MOS/NC isn't being WP:OWNed by anyone; it's being protected from weird special interest alterations often being pushed by intractable WikiProjects who do not believe they have to play be the same rules as other editors. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ʕ(Õلō)ˀ Contribs. 02:32, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Evidence presented by Jojalozzo

Current word length: 229; diff count: 0.

Policy and MOS harmed by Bold

Three related problems I have experienced that might be relevant for this case are

  1. non-trivial changes to policy and the MOS made without proper consensus development,
  2. modification of policy/MOS by those involved in disputes they consider flawed by unclear, conflicting or incorrect wording of policy/MOS and
  3. thrashing in policy/MOS pages where disputed content is modified and reverted so frequently that the policy or guidelines is unusable.

Evidence can be found in the last two months' history at WP:TITLE and WP:MOSCAPS. A large proportion of the activity in that period has been disputed and should not have occurred (including contributions by me at MOSCAPS). I expect others are compiling lists of diffs so I will not duplicate their efforts but let me know if you need me to provide them.

To those whose main contributions are content, a general understanding of policy and style guidelines is sufficient but for those whose efforts emphasize correcting the results of misunderstandings and ignorance of policy/MOS, stability in those areas is critical and bold changes can quickly escalate into edit wars, time suck, and mangled policy and MOS content. While we could achieve temporary stability and gain time to consolidate and restructure by freezing the most problematic pages, I propose we consider permanent meta-policy that all non-trivial changes to policy and MOS pages be made via formal RfC process (no bold edits). Jojalozzo 17:18, 30 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Evidence presented by {your user name}

before using the last evidence template, please make a copy for the next person

{Write your assertion here}

Place argument and diffs which support your assertion; for example, your first assertion might be "So-and-so engages in edit warring", which should be the title of this section. Here you would show specific edits to specific articles which show So-and-so engaging in edit warring.

{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.

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