I finally got around to filing an appeal on my cold fusion topic ban. Writing it, I could see, easily, why I'd abandoned Wikipedia instead of immediately appealing. I only filed this one because I'd seen the way a Nobel laureate was treated, a few days ago, on this same subject.

(Brian Josephson, who also has that WP user name. He was so offended by routine WP editor behavior, the anti-fringe claque, that he had started raving about an oil company conspiracy. I discussed this with him extensively by email, and he backed down. But we might have seen a headline: Wikipedia Bans Nobel Prize Winner. The process had started.)

Request for clarification Permanent link.

JzG responded, with the most dense, POV-pushing personal attack I've seen in a long time from him. I'm not sure he's actually lying, because he may believe what he thinks, but his thinking is radically disconnected from what actually happened, and he asserts it all as if it's obvious fact, no evidence needed. My guess is that this is quite how he remembers things. He remembers that he was Right, and Abd was Wrong but kept beating this dead horse. Then he fills in some details.

He still thinks he's right about copyright violation, for example, when that argument has been rejected everywhere it was actually considered by neutral editors. And others repeat his position, because it helps them keep out the convenience links that allow people to quickly check sources. It's pure POV-pushing, JzG would come up with six reasons to blacklist lenr-canr.org, they would all be dismantled, that was done in excruciating detail at Talk:Martin Fleischmann, with almost 100% consensus, participation by experienced editors, including an arb, and yet he'd later cheerfully remove links -- explicitly approved by an admin, that's what whitelisting required -- based on "copyvio web site", and so would his clique.

I didn't appeal before this because I'd developed a sense of futility, it was just Too Damned Hard to penetrate the fog of lies, repeated over and over, just to get a snippet of text in or to balance an article.

Writing the appeal, I got it again. I was left, after spending a full day boiling it down, with Too Many Words. I could have spent another day, but it just wasn't worth it. It's only a damn web site, and I have real work to do, of far more significance. One arbitrator has already commented that he agrees with Guy more than me, and I doubt that fewer words would have been more effective.

If he is typical, ready to judge when I'm certain he hasn't reviewed the evidence and considered the arguments, based only on immediate appearance, and agreeing with a blatant ad hominem argument, I wouldn't want to be any part of Wikipedia. I already knew that some arbs were like this, maybe most, so, the question is, are there any left who aren't?

My original cold fusion topic ban was based on evidence provided by Enric Naval, cited without apparently being carefully read, because one of the items cited, as if it was about me, was actually EN's opinion, presented in the Fringe Science arbitration, where he argued against the position that ArbComm took in its decision. It was written before I ever edited Cold fusion. So ArbComm, in banning me, cited evidence that had nothing to do with me, except as an argument EN was presenting, that ArbComm had previously rejected. I brought this up at the time on an RfAr Talk page. It was ignored.

Probably too many words.

Finding consensus, especially through writing, takes a lot of words, that's a known fact. (Skilled facilitation can reduce this, but not eliminate it.) If decisions are to be based on consensus, you need full discussion. However, if decisions are to be based on ad hoc, low-discussion local-majority rule, i.e., mob rule, sound bites are what you want. Polemic. That's what the arb is approving, that's what actual decisions, many of them, encourage.

I'm not holding my breath.

I don't think anyone here still cares, but JzG has, once again, used his admin tools in the primary dispute here. It all started with his unilateral blacklisting of lenr-canr.org, and he was admonished over this by ArbComm, and he just did it again, today. There is evidence at the bottom of my RfAr/Clarification about the current activity.

I strongly suspect that ArbComm will not look at any of the substance here, even though their prior decisions are being flagrantly disregarded, and it would take only a few minutes to confirm that.

It is the American model of jurisprudence, which depends on skilled lawyers on each site. In the European model, judges actively investigate, pursuing the public interest. The American model is great for lazy judges, sit back and let everyone else do the work. (Someone else may correct my sloppy categorization of legal systems.)

The whole place is corrupt. JzG is an "old tymer" so of course Arbcom and everyone else will over look what he does. The "old tymers" know this, so they go ahead and do what they want.

Yeah. They are not usually this blatant, though.

DGG, who has often had a level head about this stuff, reverted JzG's addition to the blacklist, and confronted him for going against prior consensus without discussion. JzG just sputtered "copyvio!" and some variation of "this place is going to the dogs."

What's fascinating to me is that JzG would do this in the middle of an RfAr request, largely over his behavior. He's taking a risk. Why? Insane is my conclusion.

He believes what he writes. He was always Right. No matter what was said, he remembers his arguments as a finding and as consensus, not the actual discussion results and decisions.

He depends on people to not check anything out, or to only look very superficially. And he's often right about that, they won't. ArbComm apparently isn't. But there are some arbitrators that didn't used to be like that. Will they speak up? Or are they all burned out?

Edit: Actually, looks like it's too late to do anything anyways.

Aw, shoot, this is too long. If you don't want to read it, be my guest! If you think I shouldn't write too much, why? If it's too much for you, it's not for you!

If you could print on toilet paper, you could print it out and use it. Or not bother spending the ink.

But I'm not about to waste more time boiling down something that you are unlikely to read anyway, if you aren't interested. I'll do that when I care enough about convincing you.

Grrr.... Wikipedia does this to me, I should stay away from the place. Hey, that's what my friends at ArbComm want!

Maybe. Maybe it was too late some years ago.

However, JzG is getting troutslapped here, I think. I doubt that he'll win on the blacklisting issue, he was only able to work in the shadows on that. Given the state of the meta blacklisting discussion, it seems unlikely to me that lenr-canr.org will be blacklisted. JzG is making noises that he's disgusted.

And I get to be blocked based on some blatantly bogus issues. Yeah, I'm a nuisance. Risker et al seem to think I don't get it, but I know quite well why I was banned, better than them, they only know their own points of view, which I understand, I see why it looks as it does to them.

They are declining the RfAr/Clarification that I'd filed, it's been moved to Amendment, though I wasn't asking for any amendment of the case.

The way it's falling out with the 2-week block by Future Perfect, I'm to be continued to be prohibited from any comment anywhere on Wikipedia that relates in any way to cold fusion. That's not what GWH had actually stated, and I'd asked him for clarification. He gave me an ambiguous answer, but, as I show on my Talk page, I made many comments relating to cold fusion, with no complaints, most of them right after the ban was declared. He was asked about the comments by Raul654, that paragon of neutrality, and Hipocrite, that upstanding troll. He didn't respond to them, either.

I stopped asking GWH because it seemed it was clear he was willing to permit me to discuss CF on editor talk pages, where the editors didn't mind. He still hasn't stated that these should be prohibited, that's Future Perfect's position, which wasn't surprising. Future Perfect is as neutral on this as a piranha, from past history with him.

So I was blocked for a comment on the whitelist page that requested lenr-canr.org be removed from the whitelist since it had been delisted at meta. JzG responded with a completely gratuitious claim of copyvio and unilaterally added the site to the blacklist, so I requested delisting on the blacklist page, his listing being radically out of process and use-of-tools-while-involved. I didn't mention cold fusion, it was about copyright and blacklist policy, but since lenr-canr.org is a cold fusion library, that's considered topic violation.

Well, sure, if you say so. A neutral request, merely being helpful, for cleanup, it should not have been controversial at all. The purpose of bans has been completely lost. They are to make decisions simple, and that's why they generally are about pages, which was how the renewed topic ban was worded. If one has to read the actual edit and parse it for meaning, the ban has become subjective. Was that edit about cold fusion, or was it about copyvio and blacklist policy, and is copyvio and blacklist policy about "cold fusion"?

What happens is that a fertile ground for wikilawyered ABF is created, when bans are interpreted so strictly, to edits that would never be considered disruptive in themselves.

This is the irony: I'd become involved with cold fusion because of the abusive blacklisting of lenr-canr.org, at the end of 2008, by JzG, not the reverse.

I only later read the article and came to my conclusions about cold fusion. Which, by the way, seems to happen to almost everyone who actually reads the evidence, there are lots of examples of physicists who turned that corner. The hold-outs -- who are probably still in the majority -- have concluded that, since cold fusion is bogus, why bother reading the papers? After all, it's impossible, etc.

I knew why it was impossible, so did Brian Josephson (T-C-L-K-R-D) and several other Nobel laureates, as well as Martin Fleischmann, and all the cold fusion researchers. What's "impossible" is interesting, when the evidence shows otherwise but theory is insistent. I sat with Richard P. Feynman, through the two year series of lectures that became the standard physics text for years, and what I learned from him was to never worship theory, especially your own.

The theory was correct, but was misapplied. You cannot calculate the probability of an "unknown nuclear reaction," which is what Pons and Fleischmann actually claimed in 1989. "Fusion" was considered a likely explanation, but that's theory, and doesn't trump experiment. What was happening? The physics community, in 1989, and too many of today's physics-knowledgeable Wikipedia editor community, believed, "nothing," it must be some mistake, but they never bothered to identify the actual error in the fundamental report of unexplained heat.

Later, the missing "ash" was identified, clearly, beyond doubt, as helium, very unexpected, through replicable and replicated experiment. But by that time the physicists had formed that dangerous mental creation, certainty of opinion. Bogus. "They are just die-hards."

Yeah, there are those of us who don't give up when popular opinion is against us. Die-hards. I'll take it, wrap it, do you take Mastercard?

I'm thinking it may be about time to play whack-a-mole, from the fun side. It was work to go through editor talk pages and email. Much easier to just edit, and I can reboot my modem like the 7-year old kid on Wikiversity who knew to do that when blocked.

They get what they buy. I've shown how to rehabilitate -- actually! -- blocked and banned editors, even when an administrator opposed it and they don't like it. They want banned to stay banned. It doesn't work, but that's the definition of dysfunctional behavior, repeated well beyond demonstration of not working.

The defacto Wikipedia power structure is opposed to what is necessary for the functional creation of neutral text, true consensus process, therefore that community is the enemy of the primary goal of Wikipedia.


Fascinating, eh? While I can't block them, I can deny them exclusive, unchallenged control of the content, make it clear who is excluding what. Me and dozens or hundreds or thousands of others. I've been laying out the plan on my Talk page, don't know if anyone is watching.

It doesn't matter if it will work or not. What matters is that it will be more fun than trying to cooperate directly, as I demonstrated by trying cooperation for almost two years. Too much work! Gad, I spent hours today writing about unblock. Horseshit! It shouldn't be that hard. So I won't let it be.

I'll be unblocked or I won't, and the consequences will follow. This is just a two-week block, but the conditions may be making it clear that I'm to be considered bound and gagged. Nope. I'm not.

JzG feels indivisible, like all the old tymers. And he probably is. Most of them are.

When Geogre got whacked by arbcom for having an abusive sock puppet for years and that sock puppet was blocked, he was so insulted that he stopped editing (under that name at least) even though he was not blocked for sock puppetting like a new tymer would be.

Yeah, there are a thousand stories.

Jehochman explained this to me during the RfAr I'd filed re JzG. He said that JzG had lots of points from long service, so he'd be admonished for use of tools while involved, but not more. However, he also said that JzG would be on a short leash. He was wrong about that.

I pointed out the problem at the time: ArbComm said, "You should not have done that. Go and sin no more." But they never got a 'confession' from JzG, they didn't ask him to explain what his mistake had been, so that they could be confident that he would not repeat it. I suggested that ArbComm should, for recusal failure, suspend the tools. I.e., temporarily desysop, until assured that the failure would not recur. Simple. Not punitive at all.

But "they don't do temporary desysop." Why not?

So, big surprise, JzG didn't "get it." He still believes that he was right, and that all that happened was that Abd managed to bamboozle them on a bad day. He still thinks that the delisting of lenr-canr.org was a fluke, the way he wrote at meta was that I got it delisted on my "nth request." Sure. My nth request. N =2, the first request being the original request two years ago, immediately after the original listing at his request. I was told that I could always request pages to be whitelisted, and maybe if there were enough legitimate uses, they'd dellist.

So, long term plan: request whitelistings, get them, then come back to meta and request delisting. I did, and, in spite of tendentious and irrelevant argument by JzG, and in spite of some severe reluctance, I'd say -- the blacklist admins, who specialize in that, are horrifically reluctant to *ever* reverse a decision, you practically have to beat them over the head, I found.

JzG has a seriously self-serving memory of What Happened. I think he's a sociopath, literally, if his real life is anything like his on-line life.

That successful delisting request at meta, where lengthy argument was made necessary by tendentious opposition, and where it was obvious that if I didn't present serious evidence, it was going to be denied, was a major factor in my renewed cold fusion topic ban. The length of it offended GWH, and he banned me before the conclusion came down.

Yes. Banned on Wikipedia for a request at meta. I didn't think they did that. Well, GWH did.

It's really a repetition of what came before. My original topic ban on cold fusion and my three-month site ban, and my MYOB ban -- the first ever, to my knowledge, hugely imprecise and wikilawyered to death -- came down because of a *successful* RfAr filed over an abusive ban declared by a very abusive administrator. He was desysopped. I think they blamed me for his actions, if I hadn't been so "disruptive," they'd still have had this fine upstanding scientist-administrator, their pride and joy.

Nope. William M. Connolley was abusive and had abused many, and other administrators had thrown up their hands in despair over it, since he cheerfully wheel-warred with them and he had powerful friends who always poured in whenever anyone filed an AN report over something he'd done. They could interdict a consensus against him, through numbers. Ask Jennavecia. I wonder what she'd say.

I sacrificed my right to edit Wikipedia freely in order to accomplish that. Yeah, I'm proud of that, I'm so Right I make myself sick. That's my problem to deal with.

I'm having fun. This is the first time I've edited Wikipedia when blocked. Gee, it's easy. I did a few edits while blocked at Wikiversity, special situation. Caused no problem there. I'm aware that it may be quite different at Wikipedia. I can pretty much anticipate the responses, but I don't know how much and how far they will go.

Action research, eh?

Disclosed.

Do remember, if you were around, that I facilitated WMC's wiki-suicide by defying his ban with an obviously harmless edit. That's not why I'm doing this, but I look at situations from many points of view at the same time.

I wasn't trolling JzG into renewing that same blacklisting that got him troutslapped last time, it totally shocked me, I didn't think him that crazy.

I'm not going to do it, my own situation has become far too precarious, but anyone who wants to go for him, to take him to ArbComm, now has a beautiful and recent example of his serious insanity. His bit would not survive this time, I'd predict.

He was already instructed not to use his tools while involved, in RfAr/Abd and JzG.

I'd assist. I can feed diffs, diffs don't have fingerprints on them.

I'm just, here, working out some obvious consequences of the administrators' decisions.

Here is JzG believing that I'm this Really Bad Continual Waste of Time. Gee, sounds like he thinks I won. He's the admin, I'm blocked. How come I'm so powerful?

(Secret: I advocate consensus. That's dangerous, if it isn't recognized, in an adhocracy, but, eventually, it comes out, though it can take years.)

Strange, his friends at meta haven't poured into satisfy his whims. The place has clearly gone to the dogs.

He seems to think that the wiki would have been better off with "warning, final warning, block." Great. With that applied to him. Did you ever see RfC/JzG 2? Or was that the first RfC/JzG? I forget.

And what is more uncivil, telling someone to go fuck themself, or lying to AN to get someone banned?

Here's another reason to remove JzG's bit, the guy's a vandal.

Len Stirling is a well known former politician in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. He was leader of the Liberal Party in the province in the 1980s and, as such, served as Leader of the Opposition in the Newfoundland legislature.

I was surprised, therefore, to find that there was no article on him in Wikipedia and even more surprised that to find that there used to be an article but it was deleted without so much as an AfD by JzG. His rationale?

"G10: Attack page or negative unsourced BLP: No sources, disparaging of another living individual, no evidence of actual notability."

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...=edit&redlink=1

Fortunately, there's a mirror of the article here: http://dictionary.sensagent.com/len+stirling/en-en/

Now JzG appears to be right that the article requires sources (but wrong in claiming there were none) but that's easily fixed. But he's dead wrong when he says it was an "attack page", there is no personal attack on the subject in it and absolutely wrong when he says there is "no evidence of actual notability". Stirling was the leader of the opposition for heaven's sake.

Does JzG just go around deleting perfectly fixable articles on a whim or is he a vandal?

Do you not know what the word "or" means?

Point taken. Fact is, JzG does this sort of thing a lot, delete articles for reasons only known to himself and give reasons that have no correlation with reality and don't stand up to scrutiny.

He is either a vandal or incompetent. If I didn't know better I'd ask why in the world hasn't he lost his bit by now.

I hope you're not defending Guy. He's really, profoundly not worth it.

Nuke was making a joke... that Guy Chapman is so clueless about what he should be doing on Wikipedia, that his work amounts to vandalism. That's how I read it, anyway.

The G10 rationale is what I was referring to, actually.

"Or" is a long wooden paddle that you use for rowing a boat.

Made of gold.

Wouldn't that sink the boat?

Not if JzG is rowing. His belief in himself rises above all possible density, it is what makes pigs fly. You've got to admire it. He's still trying, it doesn't matter how many times his claims have been completely blown out of the water, rejected, discounted and disregarded. Funny thing, that's what he always says about me!

And on Wikipedia, he was believed. That's why I was topic-banned again, if you want the short of it.

Rock the boat / don't rock the boat, baby
Rock the boat / don't tip the boat over....