QUOTE(Moulton @ Tue 20th May 2008, 1:28pm)
What I need help on — and I'm quite sincere and serious about this — is understanding what I might have done differently
here, when I first raised the same objections to Hrafn, Filll, and ConfuciousOrnis.
Well, I guess the point is that there is little anyone could have done.
I think if you were a Wikipedian of good standing, say a Tim Vickers, you might have held your ground with judicious use of noting appropriate policy.
The main point is that your VALID points that fell within policy were simply set aside as it claimed you were doing original research.
It is an argument that has been discussed on the OR pages: if someone uses a poor quality source and you are unable to use The Rules to get it rejected (in this case, the sourcing, as an advertisement should be dismissed either as a primary source which offers no commentary on its meaning, which others provide via OR to insert) it is quite often difficult to find another source that refutes the misinterpretation without descending into accusations of synthesis. Note you were not defeated on the quality of your arguments, you were defeated by a deliberate distortion of policy to support an erroneous point of view.
Given that your protagonists were using the identical policy that should have rejected their views to maintain their dubious claims, it is difficult to see how you could have held sway. By the time you appealed to higher powers, you had already been characterised as intransigent - which on re-reading, I do not really see, you will always be seen as intransigent if someone refuses to accept that they are wrong in the face of a reasonable quality of evidence.
Put simply: it is obvious that there was nothing a novice editor could have done to avoid the situation. It has required the notoriety of the event and some other hardened editors, well versed in Wikipedian ways, to sort out the article. That they were able to do this suggests that you were not necessarily wrong or intransigent.
Given that your immediate concerns of poor quality biographies are being addressed, then I suggest the appropriate thing to do, to show good faith in the Wikipedian processes, would be to await the Cla68/SV/FeloniousMonk ArbCom decision which should either identify the ID Crowd as an issue that needs to be resolved - where anyone cornered by that group should be up for review, or you will know that the Wikipedian processes are irredeemable and you should lobby for support for getting Greg onto the WMF and work for changes that way.