Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Rex071404 3/Evidence

Anyone, whether directly involved or not, may add evidence to this page. Please make a header for your evidence and sign your comments with your name.

When placing evidence here, please be considerate of the arbitrators and be concise. Long, rambling, or stream-of-conciousness rants are not helpful.

As such, it is extremely important that you use the prescribed format. Submitted evidence should include a link to the actual page diff; links to the page itself are not sufficient. For example, to cite the edit by Mennonot to the article Anomalous phenomenon adding a link to Hundredth Monkey use this form: [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anomalous_phenomenon&diff=5587219&oldid=5584644] [1].

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Evidence presented by JamesMLane

Most of the evidence is already presented in the Request for Arbitration. The evidence there includes specific diffs showing:

• Rex's violations of the Arbitration Committee's four-month ban on editing articles on U.S. politics (1 Mar 2005)
• Rex's vandalism of Neutrality's user page (19 Mar 2005), my user page (23 Mar 2005), my talk page (23 Mar 2005), Killian documents (23 Mar 2005), and Talk:Killian documents (23 Mar 2005)
• An example of Rex's violations of the Arbitration Committee's six-month ban on reverting (24 Mar 2005)
• Rex's three short-term blocks since his return (19 Mar 2005, 22 Mar 2005, and 25 Mar 2005).

What I'll add here are the diffs of Rex's revert warring on Killian documents. (The RfAr has the links noting that he was blocked but not the evidence of the reverting that led to the blocks.) Under the terms of the Arbitration Committee ruling of November 13, 2004, Rex was not allowed to revert at all, let alone violate the three-revert rule.

21-22 Mar 2005

Background: On 14 Mar 2005, Rex edited the opening sentence of Killian documents:

Previous text: "The Killian documents were documents central to a controversy which arose during the 2004 US presidential campaign."

Rex's version: "The Killian documents is a term used to refer a particular set of photocopies of unsubstantiated provenance which were central to a controversy which arose during the 2004 US presidential campaign." [2]

This change was reverted. (The article reports the facts that the documents were photocopies and that CBS News, which used them in a broadcast, could not verify their provenance. The edit war didn't arise from any attempt to suppress these facts, which supported one side in the dispute over authenticity. It arose because Rex wanted to put these facts right at the beginning, before the reader even learned that there was an authenticity dispute, let alone why it might matter. No one other than Rex thought his version was better.)

On 19 Mar 2005, Rex returned to the article and inserted a slightly different version of the opening sentence he wanted: "The Killian documents is a term used to refer a particular set of photocopies of unsubstantiated provenance central to a controversy which arose during the 2004 US presidential campaign." [3] He asserted on the talk page that his language was "utterly neutral and 100% accurate". His edit of the article's opening sentence was reverted.

The first edit war began on 21 Mar 2005.

• 15:58, 21 Mar 2005
  • Rex made his first revert, returning the opening sentence to the version he had created on 19 Mar 2005, with only a slight change: "The Killian documents is a term used to refer a particular set of photocopies of unsubstantiated provenance that were central to a controversy which arose during the 2004 US presidential campaign. [4] (The only difference from his earlier version was that he inserted the words "that were" before "central to a controversy". He didn't even correct the apparent omission of the word "to" after "refer".)

• 06:15, 22 Mar 2005
  • Rex made his second revert, restoring the version of the opening sentence that he had inserted by his previous edit. [5]

• 06:22, 22 Mar 2005
  • Rex made his third revert, again restoring his version of seven minutes earlier. [6]

• 06:35, 22 Mar 2005
  • Rex made his fourth revert, again restoring his version of thirteen minutes earlier. [7]

• 06:48, 22 Mar 2005
  • Rex made his fifth revert, again restoring his version of thirteen minutes earlier. [8]

• 06:58, 22 Mar 2005
  • Rex made his sixth revert ([9]), restoring his version of ten minutes earlier but with minor wording changes that did not address the objections that had been raised (see [10] for his changes to his version). These minor changes may have been made because, in an edit summary and in a note on User talk:216.153.214.94, I had reminded Rex of the three-revert rule. In making his sixth revert in this series, Rex said, "this is not a revert." My understanding is that an editor can't use inconsequential changes of this type to evade the rule.

• 07:05, 22 Mar 2005
  • Rex was blocked for 24 hours for 3RR violation. [11] Of course, under the Arbitration Committee's ruling, Rex was not allowed to make even a single revert. (See decision, item 4.1: "Rex071404 is banned from reverting any article for six months.")

24-25 Mar 2005

Rex returned from his 24-hour block and promptly resumed edit warring on Killian documents. His first post-block edit to any article was to restore his last pre-block version of the first sentence of Killian documents, although again with slight wording changes. [12] (Here's the comparison showing the minor differences he introduced while essentially restoring the version of the first sentence that he had reverted to immediately before his block: [13].) Soon after that revert, he blanked the entire article. [14] After it was restored, he continued his skirmishing over the lead section, sometimes reverting the first sentence and then, when that tactic seemed fruitless, trying to get his wording into the second sentence. He also engaged in multiple reverts of a sentence added by Zen-master that reported the charge of Republican involvement in the documents. (Here are links to Zen-master's addition, and to Rex's reverts of it: [15], [16], [17].)

Rex went even further, violating the three-revert rule, on another aspect of the article. On 23 Mar 2005, Rex added a new section to the article. [18] Headed "Actual form", the section added no new facts, but represented yet another attempt by Rex to highlight and emphasize the particular facts that he wanted to trumpet because they supported his POV. As usual, Rex relentlessly pressed for his addition.

• 3:08, 24 Mar 2005
  • After the "Actual form" section was removed, Rex restored it, his first revert on this point. [19]

• 17:07, 24 Mar 2005
  • Rex again restored the section, his second revert on this point. [20]

• 18:53, 24 Mar 2005
  • Rex again restored the section, his third revert on this point. [21]

• 02:47, 25 Mar 2005
  • Rex again restored the section, his fourth revert of it in less than 24 hours. [22]

• 03:14, 25 Mar 2005
  • As a consequence of Rex's violation of the three-revert rule, he was blocked again, this time for 48 hours because it was his second offense in the same article. [23]

Evidence presented by Zen-master

31 March 2005

• 19:37 being disruptive (vandalizing a page with obvious POV) to illustrate a point [24]

4 April 2005

• 02:31 Stalking my change history and reverting a legitimate clean up on another article just because of our disagreement on the Killian documents article. He ironically labeled his out of the blue revert of my clean up "Zen appears to be trolling". [25]

Supplemental evidence presented by JamesMLane

4 April 2005

• 07:21, Apr 4, 2005
  • Rex was blocked for 48 hours again for repeated reverting in violation of section 4.1 of the previous ArbCom decision. [26]

Since returning from his previous block, Rex has engaged in frequent reverts at John Kerry and Killian documents. He has also reverted changes made by other editors in articles in which he previously evinced no interest, the common aspect being that he went to those articles to revert changes by editors who had disagreed with him on some of the articles where he's incessantly reverting. Examples include his revert of Ray Radlein on Xena:Warrior Princess, and his revert of Zen-master on Hubbert peak.

Evidence presented by Szyslak

4 April 2005

• 05:51 to 07:15
  • Made his usual edits to John Kerry, with personal attacks in many of his edit summaries. I'm separating each edit into its own diff to make it easy to see the personal attacks: [27], [28] (calls the statement he removed a "total lie"), [29], [30], [31], [32], [33], [34], [35], [36], [37], [38], [39], [40], [41] (personal attack on Hadal, essentially calling him a liar), [42] (revert of my reverts), [43] (nasty personal attack on Neutrality). His edits were reverted by Hadal ([44]), Neutrality ([45]), Ray Radlein ([46]) and myself ([47] and [48]).

These edits later led to his block on April 4, as shown in #Supplemental evidence presented by JamesMLane.

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