Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/BLP issues on British politics articles/Evidence

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Evidence presented by ianmacm

Caesar's wife must be above suspicion

That was Pompeia (wife of Caesar), but it is also true of editing BLP articles about politicians, not just the British ones. My two cents is that anyone who edits a high profile BLP article about a politician should realise that their actions will be scrutinised not just by other Wikipedians, but also by the mainstream media. This means that they cannot afford to get into spats with the subject of the article, or do or say anything off-wiki that would compromise their ability to do the job on-wiki. Unlike the mainstream media, I don't have any problem with Philip Cross being a frequent editor, but edits to articles involving living people and politicians have to be handled with care. The media had a field day with the goons tweet, which led to his actions and Wikipedia as a whole coming under intense scrutiny. WP:WRW says most of this already.--♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 17:27, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

Evidence presented by KalHolmann

The heading and contents of my section were censored by ArbCom

In the wake of continuing evisceration of my evidence by the ArbCom clerk, I withdraw my statement in full and will submit nothing further. KalHolmann (talk) 17:55, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

Evidence presented by power~enwiki

Bias in editing Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party

The page Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party, while not a biography, contains a significant amount of content related to BLPs in British politics. The page is currently something of a WP:COATRACK of anti-semitism claims and rebuttals about Jeremy Corbyn. Many of the issues there are best considered content disputes, or are back-and-forth editing where single diffs may be unhelpful or misleading. That said, I feel several editors have a clear POV when editing that article. One of them is Philip Cross.

Regarding Philip Cross's edits, many involve a mural that Corbyn made comments about in 2012. The material regarding the mural was initially added by PC, and then reverted by Slatersteven with the comment Not about an incident on 2018, nor should this just turn into a list of every accusation against Corbyn, it should not be an attack page. (editmsg spelling fixed). I find the combination of [1] and [2] to be puzzling; I don't understand his standard for "fresh developments" here. He has also added material about Corbyn's anti-semitism to other articles, such as Jonathan Freedland and Chris Williamson. Overall, it appears that his objective here is to add material suggesting that Corbyn supports anti-semitic causes, and to minimize material claiming otherwise.

Evidence presented by Govindaharihari

Cross is a prolificic contributor. If you edit in a wp:npov wikipedia policy compliant manor you will not raise the heckles of the internet and living people that you are changing their biographies, that is just a fact. Many editors are changing biographies without coming under attack from grieved parties. When you come under attack for such editing of living peoples life stories to then go to the internet to further the dispute with them is a step too far for a wikipedia editor that wants to continue editing those articles. I would have done this by motion but we have a case, so considering the editing and real world reactions of Cross, I think it is in wikipedia's best interests to restrict this contributor and I support a WP:BLP block on this editor from british political articles. Govindaharihari (talk) 20:46, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

Evidence presented by JzG

Assertions were made about Philip Cross (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) and COI. I checked the following:

• The sources presented, which to my eyes would clearly fail WP:RS for any mainspace edit.
• talk:George Galloway and archives, where there is little to no evidence of any meaningful discussion about the issues Galloway raises. Prior to KalHolmann's COI claims, the talk page was basically tumbleweed.
• special:Contributions/Philip Cross, who has over 130,000 edits in 14 years to thousands of articles.
• special:Contributions/KalHolmann, the then complainant, who had then around 3,000 edits, mainly to politically charged articles.

Bluntly, it looked like trolling.

That said, I continued to follow the discussion, reconsidered, and took it to the admin board. I watched, but did not take any meaningful part in, that discussion. I also read the off-wiki sources. I was persuaded by people like Cullen328, who I hold in very high regard, that regardless of the self-evident hyperbole surrounding the claims (email sent to arbs separately), there was a serious user conduct issue. I don't see it as a COI, I see it as someone who was attacked for what they wrote on Wikipedia, reacted inappropriately with off-wiki taunts, and became sufficiently involved that they clearly, as they admit, should have walked away. But I could easily be wrong about that, the waters are very muddy. Hopefully the sequence of events will become clear in this case.

I framed the statement at the admin board as I did because I reviewed a sample of PC's edits and most of them were uncontroversial in and of themselves and I missed the extent of PC's off-wiki trolling of Galloway. Yes, PC's edits are often net negative in tone. The same applies to most edits to a lot of articles on unpopular people. They are often unpopular for a reason.

If there is any truth to the claims and statements made by Galloway, outlined again by email noting the source, then it would be an absolutely massive problem. I doubt this, though other facets of that discussion, per email, are deeply disturbing. His most vocal defenders don't appear to acknowledge that he is a divisive, consciously provocative and widely disliked figure. Of course he is still entitled to an accurate and neutral article, even if that may not exactly reflect his self-image.

If it's just a case of an obsessive editor and the tribalism that besets much of current politics, then there should be nothing needed other than to endorse the existing topic ban and some work by the community to frame better guidance on how to handle off-wiki attacks relating to Wikipedia edits. Clearly we can't allow every article subject to veto edits to an article just by attacking the editor off-wiki, but equally there is a line, and it's probably good to explore where it is and how best to handle it.

What I am looking for, and I hope someone can show me, is evidence of engagement around the article itself. That the people most concerned about Philip Cross have reached out to Galloway and advised him how to engage the Wikipedia community to address any legitimate concerns he might have over his biography. I have tried this myself but without success so far. I am well aware that people can become hurt and angry about Wikipedia articles even if they are 100% accurate and true, and I have no idea if Galloway's article is NPOV or not. It's very difficult to address concerns over an article when your main route for communication is the kind of off-wiki statements presented to date, which are long on conspiracism and personalisation and short on specific "please change X to Y based on Z source". I hope at least he's been given the OTRS email address, which I passed along to someone who is in touch with him. Guy (Help!) 23:15, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

Evidence presented by 173.228.123.166 (talk)

Philip Cross's edit statistics

I started a statistical check of Philip Cross's edits at User talk:173.228.123.166/pc-analysis, examining a quasi-random sample of his edits. It's still incomplete but I'm convinced by now that the bulk of his edits are fine, and that they generally reflect decent taste and judgment in editing. Some analysis can be found here. I'm not claiming this data that PC's edits are free of serious problems, but only that most of the edits fall outside the problem areas or otherwise don't have problems. So I think we can dismiss the picture being spread off-wiki of PC making 10,000's of horrible edits. If horrible edits are present (they might be), then the quantity is much lower than some of us might have feared. 173.228.123.166 (talk) 08:26, 10 June 2018 (UTC)

BLP edit counts and diffs

Section rewritten (original version)

I've tabulated the BLP articles that PC has edited over the past year (since 2017-06-01, up til 2017-05-29) at User talk:173.228.123.166/pc/blp-count on the theory that these recent edits are more important than older ones. I then split out the edits for the top 5 on that list:

• User talk:173.228.123.166/pc/Craig Murray
• User talk:173.228.123.166/pc/George Galloway
• User talk:173.228.123.166/pc/Toby Young
• User talk:173.228.123.166/pc/Ken Loach
• User talk:173.228.123.166/pc/Paul Dacre

I also did User talk:173.228.123.166/pc/Tim Hayward (academic) since he's a non-politician who was cited in a specific diff.

These do look tendentious by the edit summaries. By the timestamps, he leaves the articles alone for reasonable periods but has bursts of editing in them. I leave it up to others to check individual diffs. A tabulation over PC's entire edit history (done earlier) is at User talk:173.228.123.166/pc-blpcounts. BLP edits are around 49k of his 130k total edits.

Overall I don't see any support for Craig Murray's claim that "the purpose of the “Philip Cross” operation is systematically to attack and undermine the reputations of those who are prominent in challenging the dominant corporate and state media narrative. particularly in foreign affairs."[3] I see a wide-ranging, mostly pretty good editor who sometimes gets overheated about certain kinds of articles and specific people.

These edit lists take a little bit of cut/paste nuisance at my end, but I can do more on request if anyone wants any specific ones (don't go crazy). Please post any requests to /Evidence talk rather than my user talk. 173.228.123.166 (talk) 06:16, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

Evidence presented by FiveFilters

Hostile editing of author and human rights activist Craig Murray

According to the statement above by 173.228.123.166, Craig Murray's Wikipedia page has been Cross' most edited BLP page in the last year. Overall it is his 10th most edited Wikipedia entry. WhoColor calculates that Murray's entry on 9 May 2018 (the last version edited by Cross at time of writing) contained almost 70% content from Cross, making him the top editor of the page by a long margin (the editor in second place apparently only contributed 3% of the content on the page).

Craig Murray has been quite vocal about the edits made to his page by Cross, and has posted quite a lot of about it on his site.

• Cross removes Murray's photo from infobox because he claims it's "untypical" then adds it back in one month later with no explanation.

• Cross removes trivia he doesn't like, but gleefully adds trivia he finds "irresistible"

• In a section criticising Murray for naming one of Julian Assange's accusers, Cross removes a plausible explanation given by Murray for doing so, and instead chooses to add to the criticism by quoting someone else's opinion. He generally removes positive information and adds in lots of criticism and trivia: [4], [5], [6], [7]

I'll add more examples here later.

Evidence presented by {{Not a Wikipedia Editor using IP 86.171.181.15}

{I would not edit any Wikipedia Page edited by Philip Cross}

I have edited a large amount of non-Wikipedia material in the past. I have considered editing Wikipedia. Quite recently, my attention was drawn to a change in George Galloway's page. The change seems attributed to Philip Cross and seems to change his mother's political leaning from Republican to Nationalist with zero comment on the huge difference between the two political positions.

As someone who could be considered a Primary Source for such an edit, I know that such things besmirch the people that this kind of edit has been applied to. I also know that to those not interested in the politics of Nationism and Republicanism, there seems little difference. The presentation of Galloway in the page is a gross, unfair and hugely distorted misrepresentation, as a consequence, which will go largely unequestioned by the General Reader. It really comes across as the 'Dark Arts' that got the News of the World closed.

As Philip Cross edits articles they become gradually less about the Person and more about the Media default for that Person. His edits are incredibly well delivered and read fluently and clearly. They also read as though they are managed by a hugely experienced and competent copy editor for a Mainstream Media outlet. In essence, his edits of Journalists tend to the fawning and his edits of non-journalists tend to the scathing.

I will not be editing any page edited by Philip Cross. Any edit would be removed, reverted, reworded: anything to prevent a non media image of living persons while ensuring that any genuine contributions can be undermined by the mumbo-jumbo of Wikipedian Jargonising. The entire affair has highlighted that editing Wikipedia should be left to the profession Public Relations and Journalists who, it seems, have decided that Wikipedia is "theirs". In essence: anybody with any interest in editing Wikipedia for British Politics is hounded out by Philip Cross.

It would help to weed out the propagandising by extremely competent Wikipedians who know the system inside out and use it to remove any edit that falls outside of their editorial control if Wikipedia were to make the names of Page Editors more visible. Then I could simply not read anything written by Philip Cross. Because, all protests aside, I now no longer believe that Philip Cross is anything other than employed to ruin the reputations of one set of people while polishing the reputations of others. The Dark Arts.

Is this relevant? I suspect Wikipedia will decide that, no, it is not relevant. It is merely the anonymous whining that goes on.

Evidence presented by {your user name}

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