User talk:Levivich

Thanks for continuing to push back on the "it does't look racist to me" comments. I find those "arguments" so tiring. Maybe I'm the only commenter of Chinese descent but I'm sure there are others watching and it's not a good look. — ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · contribs · email) 13:12, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry you and everyone else has to deal with that. Levivich (talk) 14:20, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Things like Cindy Yu's UK based podcast probably don't help. Also, the CCP's propaganda department made a puzzling choice to approve a culture section named Chinese Whispers in China Daily 10 years ago or so. Sean.hoyland (talk) 14:21, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

	The Defender of the Wiki Barnstar
	For this, cheers, Huldra (talk) 20:54, 22 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Huldra! It means a lot to me coming from you. Levivich (talk) 01:27, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't that an auto recusal at AE, if not for the content, the failure to disclose? As for the referral, that would then be at least, tainted? Selfstudier (talk) 16:35, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I think so. Levivich (talk) 16:41, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

In my view, even if you discounted their participation three out of three admins referring to Arbcom rather than four out of four is still a clear consensus to refer to Arbcom. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 16:46, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I looked askance at this exchange when I first saw it: 1, 2, 3, and 24 hours after the first diff, 4. It's even worse in light of wp:involved. And RTH isn't the only one of the four admins who I have concerns about. Levivich (talk) 16:55, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The referral itself is one thing but the follow up en passant included a gratuitously selected diff to argue that editors were being scared away but just ignored the misrepresentations of the editor I was responding to. Selfstudier (talk) 17:08, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

SFR. It hardly inspired confidence in the detachment of arbitrators that User:Theleekycauldron, one of the four referring administrators, stated at the very outset this is a sprawling case where basically all of the regulars in the topic area have worked together to create a hostile battleground. That signalled to all readers that before any evidence had been forthcoming, Theleekycauldron had made up their mind that any and all longterm editors had conspired to tagteam and create a hostile environment in the IP area (my first thought was:does this mean that both putative 'sides' gang up together -against all commonsense -, or, more probably, only one side does, namely the 'pro-Pal' gaggle?) That is an extraordinary assertion of an arbitrator's personal conviction that the accusation is already a proven fact (that Arbcom only needed to formalize). I wasn't shocked, but I was surprised its damaging insinuation went unchallenged by other admins.Nishidani (talk) 17:12, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

On the subject of making up minds, SFR made up his mind about referring to arbcom a month before I even filed at AE. At the time I thought he was joking. Later, I realized: not joking. Levivich (talk) 17:19, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not for nothing, but when the rules are 500 words and 20 diffs and it's a lot of edit warring to demonstrate, that can't be helped. I am over the word limit but there's no way to have this discussion in under 500 words. you're probably moving beyond the scope of the venue. Dealing with complicated situations with many involved editors isn't a strong point of AE. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 17:27, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Come on man, admit it: your mind was made up before you ever read the first diff. Levivich (talk) 17:29, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If my mind were made up I wouldn't have spent all that time looking at the histories of all of those articles and looking at all those editor interactions. I would have just said "this looks hard, arbcom." I think the dozen or so ARBPIA AE reports I took part in after that statement (this is a rough guess) demonstrates that. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 17:35, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That's not really true, because confirmation bias. It's quite possible that your mind was made up before you reviewed the evidence, you reviewed the evidence anyway, and then confirmation bias led you to confirm your preconceived notions. Not just possible; that's how confirmation bias normally works. Levivich (talk) 17:37, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not TLC, so I can't speak for them, but I think the regulars in the topic area have worked together to create a hostile battleground in this instance would probably be better stated as the actions of many of the regular editors of the topic serve to create a hostile battleground. It's not one sided, and I don't think they said any and all. They're also not an arbitrator and won't be deciding on any case. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 17:22, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

TLC is mentioned as one of the four 'Referring administrators'. They may not arbitrate, but they are telling fellow administrators who will arbitrate somewhat authoritatively that all regulars engage in a conspiracy. That is the import of their phrasing. Since TLC is completely unknown to me (and I am a regular every day there for 18 years) I asked myself how on earth did TLC arrive at that view, if they haven't engaged to any notable extent in the IP area? Your rephrasing changes nothing. Since we 'regulars' are, and I don't mind this, minutely policed for how we express ourselves, any other experienced IP admin should have alerted TLC to the injurious aspersion indiscriminately against each and every longterm editor in the IP zone. No one did, and so, peons like myself after several days find themselves forced to raise the issue.Nishidani (talk) 19:25, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Nishidani: Well, you seem to have pinged me three times without actually having any questions for me, so I'm not really sure what you'd like me to say or answer for. I obviously think there's something worth investigating about the conduct of regulars in this topic area, otherwise I wouldn't have supported asking ArbCom to investigate it. I might well change that opinion based on what happens in a potential case, and I'd be shocked if ArbCom was taking their cues from me on whether to open a case, let alone how to close it.

As for your question about conspiracy: Yeah, I don't think you and HaOfa et al. are in an email thread somewhere gaming out how to make the topic area a hostile battleground. That'd be a silly thing to say. I do wonder why you think I'd be targeting pro-Palestinian editors specifically, since I didn't mention either side – I only spoke about the general battleground nature of the area. No, I'm not alleging a conspiracy of any kind. I'm just concerned that the hostility of the regulars on both sides combines to make a hostile environment, and I do think investigating that would be quite the challenge. But you suspect I'm targeting your group, you assume I've already made up my mind beyond reason, and you fear I'm dangerous because I'm an admin. That certainly doesn't do much to dispel my concerns about the environment in this topic area – and I don't think any of those three things are true. theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 20:58, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Put yourself in my boots. Imagine what it is like to have endured relentless complaints at AE (while not retaliating by weaponizing that forum) for most of my wiki life. Some of its sticks. I once in exasperation sighed 'Oh for fuck's sake' and was reported. Atrocious. Sometimes, when I slipped up on IR I self-suspended, even though it wasn't noticed, to train myself to be more careful. I wrote or reworked extensively over a 1,000 articles,and even if I manage to do that on say an extremely sensitive topic that could never get off its feet because of its delicacy (Birkat haMinim) I was regularly called an antisemite, and had death-threats in my email. And throughout I've managed to work an area most wikipedians avoid like the plague, with a sense of equilibrium and readiness to negotiate, even when the objections are farcical and bludgeoning (as they were in the immense push to get Zionism, race and genetics name-changed to cancel 'genetics' even though it formed the basis of the article; or when a pro-Israeli editor, but scholar of great value asked me to try and fix the chronically unworkable Amin al-Husseini article, I did so spending over a month on it (to his satisfaction), as I did with the incessantly disturbed article on the Khazars etc., only to keep getting hit, mostly by editors who seemed to spend most of their time in reverts and tweaking challenges, with complaints at AE about rare moments of exasperation. Or consider the work of many other editors like the magnificent Huldra who wrote up several hundred articles of the histories of all of the villages in Palestine down to their bulldozing, and as a reward got relentlessly attacked even with rape threats; or Tiamut, the sole Palestinian woman editor relentlessly pursued by Jaakobou through every venue until admins woke up and permabanned him- the same person Swatjester unblocked, while we lost her, and her scholarship, to wikipedia, as he did to PalestineRemembered who unfortunately let frustration at the hosility get the better of her. I'll stop there, otherwise I will write for several hours the history of what really goes on in the IP area (WP:TLDR), so I will just state this.

The standard memes about battleground mentalities, both sides are toxic, (when one has strict Rs standards mainly ignored by the numerous sock puppets who afflict the area), that desperate remedies are needed, let's nuke'em, in which all particular knowledge, all context, all sensitivity to the nuanced intricacies of a very difficult area, was, at ARCA, repeated by numerous editors who I have never seen trying to pitch in and improve that area. Where was the familiarity with the topic, its history, and the RS, which longterm editors define by very exacting standards, where was any perception of the sheer hard work required to scrupulously research each topic to make it mirror current scholarship rather than spout newspaper opinions, which a good many longterm editors have undertaken. Where was the memory of people under indictment (User:Davidbena) where editors like myself and Nableezy intervening when the editor in question looked close to being permabanned, stepping in to argue for, say, David's learning and integrity and the importance of his erudition, so that his impending permaban was suspended by the testimonies of people with a different POV and Nableezy then took on the task of mentoring him so that he would be able to enrich the project with his gifts (his POV is strongly Zionist, but none of us give a damn for that if the scholarship is sound), and he finally understands NPOV. Since then he has done splendid work.

I could recount many other episodes like that. None of this actual collaboration, care to ensure that AE deals fairly even with editors who oppose one's own views or approach to the topic), which all of the longterm editors know about, is visible in that kind of pitiless dismissive tirade about 'longterm' toxic, battleground editors. All people seem to know is what they glancingly pick up looking at block logs, or at one or two pages where collaboration proved difficult because of bludgeoning repetitiveness in the face of source consensus. Indeed long threads based on argufying by editors who were repeatedly shown not to have read the scholarly sources exist, where the minority then took me twice to arbitration because, despite the refusal to read the scholarship, my deference to arguments I thought groundless by spending an inordinate amount of time taking them seriously, was proof I was the bludgeoner.

People will laugh at this (I was mocked for saying it in 2008), that the IP area, precisely because of the intractable hostilities of the real world conflict, the manipulative pressures on sources themselves, the human biases we all have, our liabilities to frustration when exposed to stress etc., is an excellent moral training ground. You need resilience, indifference to rancour, tolerance of people who fundamentally and in good faith might hate you (both sides), patience and above all, a readiness to read upwards of 50 pages of scholarship every day to keep abreast of contemporary studies (the time this requires means you can't edit or monitor wikipedia frivolously hour in hour out, and that annoys many, who want shortcuts that don't interrupt their active participation in talk pages). One notes the latter by a simple measure, tested time and again. One reminds the page of one or two 20,30 pages academic studies (which at a minimum should require one's interlocutors at least two hours to digest) and, instead, one gets within minutes a reply or two challenging it, by editors who rather than read the sources, google responses (hopefully negative) to those RS . There are a large number of such minor methods that inform one's assessment of the quality of any editor's imput. They are never mentioned, are invisible, and yet used. None of this seems to be grasped when some complaint is raised at ANI/AE or ARCA. Editors are just mocked as a wiki-canny bunch of cronies hijacking the encyclopedia to spend their time harassing nice people to the point that fear is ubiquitous, and the mafia reigns supreme in partisan hostility to either Israel/Jews or both.

All of these complexities and the way longterm editors deal with them patiently for the most part, are lost on bystanders who, I think in the eyes of people who actually have dedicated much of their time to this area few will touch, throw out a few easy one-liners repeating those memes about bludgeoning, screaming'(!!!), battleground memtalities. There has indeed been all of that (though I can't recall anyone 'screaming'), commonly in the past, relatively rare since 500/30 was introduced. AE has handled it relatively well.

Professionally I parse things as a philologist. So I take each sentence I read literally, for what it means, or for the ambiguities resident in it. I've never encountered your editing, given the high restrictive scope of my wiki focuses (not limited to the IP area). So the way you expressed yourself esp. that all struck me as very odd. I know it mirrors a common perception, but for those who work this area, that and the many similar statements seemed 'lazy' in their lack of care to really examine the area in depth and try to grasp, if not sympathize with, the difficulties intrinsic to working a topic on the most enduring conflict in modern history and the one that has been the object of immense amount of scholarly research, difficulties the longterm editors have, in different ways, realized and tried to work through. We all have different motivations - mine is sheer curiosity at the scotoma which plagues public representations of the conflict as opposed to the lucidity of the scholarship, which rarely inflects the political and public world. And yes, I do have a POV, an empathy for any afflicted population that is and will be an historic loser, Uyghur, Tibetans, Aborigines, Palestinians, whoever. That doesn't translate into some hatred of the Chinese, my fellow Australians, Israelis/Jews etc. In the latter regard, to the contrary. Most of the scholarship I, and quite a few other 'longterm editors' use is written within Israel or the diaspora, and I think that the real conflict is between two distinct vectors within modern Judaism. That fascinates me and I have followed it since I read Toynbee in the mid 60s., picking up in the meantime a wider knowledge of things within that civilization that had nothing to do with the IP conflict at all, to which I have devoted myuch time on wiki writing about.

Sorry for this longueur, and my apologies. Nishidani (talk) 22:53, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Out of interest, since you're currently opposed to an arbitration case afaics, but IIRC once upon a time you said this topic area sucked and needed some divine help... what changed? in particular, seems like you think a different set of editors/behaviours are problematic now, compared to what you used to think? of course, I may be misremembering, it has been a while :) ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 19:10, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@ProcrastinatingReader: I certainly held that opinion before WP:PIA4 (late 2019), I don't remember if I held that opinion afterwards; probably around the time of the 2020-2021 Bantustans Brouhaha, and maybe in early 2023 trying to help build consensus for a rewrite of the lead of Israel. In both those post-PIA4 instances, it was mostly established editors that (IMO) caused the disruption (including myself). Since early 2023, one thing that's changed e.g. at Israel is that many if not all of the editors who I think were disruptive in that discussion are now banned or blocked. As a result, there has been some consensus formed to make some changes to that article. In October 2023 I thought the disruption in the topic area was surprisingly low considering the topic area and that war had just broken out. But that changed with the puppet farm that led to the recent arbcom case over email canvassing. In all, I can think of like half a dozen Israeli-ultra-nationalist-POV-pushing established editors who have been banned/blocked in the last 12-18 months or so. (There are also anti-Israeli POV pushing socks and LTAs, but not as many, and I think they were mostly blocked/banned earlier, perhaps before PIA4 or before my time here.)

As a result of these bans and blocks, today you don't have a bunch of established accounts POV pushing; now the accounts are mostly easy to spot. Like, how many people on Earth could there possibly be who started editing in April 2024, or returned to editing after a very long absence in April 2024, and all expressing the same unsupported-by-mainstream-RS views with the same talking points at the same articles, right down to the way they wield PAGs in edit summaries. Because obvious socks are obvious, they're highly ineffective. Witness: it's "Gaza genocide", and WP:ADL is red at RSP (for IP). It's one of the strengths of Wikipedia that we have defenses against using multiple accounts to influence the outcome of consensus discussions.

Because today's disruptive accounts have relatively few edits (almost all under 5,000; most under 1,000; compare with typically 25k+ for established editors), it's relatively easy to go through their edits and find patterns. There isn't that much to look at when you look at Editor Interaction Analyzer, xtools, or contribs. And that, in my opinion, makes the whole thing simple, not needing a panel of 10 or 15 people. Our ordinary tools like AE, ANI, SPI, ANEW, etc., will work fine regulating the conduct of editors with like 1,000 edits. You don't even have to prove that the accounts are linked; you can just show that they're edit warring, misrepresenting sources, forum-ing, or whatever it is they're doing. If it weren't for this referral to arbcom, I probably would have filed an SPI by now, or maybe at ANI, showing how new/sleeper accounts have shown up to "take the place" of some of the accounts who I had filed AE's against. Sure, I can show those diffs to arbcom, too, but it's overkill in my view; SPI/ANI would handle it just as well.

Sorry this was so long but I figured I'd use the opportunity to explain in full why I don't think arbcom is necessary right now, particularly since some commentators have been saying that the "regulars" are trying to downplay any problems in the topic area. For my part, it's not that I don't think there isn't disruption, it's that I think it's the type of disruption -- from new/sleeper accounts -- that is relatively easy for the community to handle. Levivich (talk) 20:17, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Can I prevail on the kindness of experts here to parse for me what PAGS refers to? I have met it several times these past days and remained perplexed. Thanks Nishidani (talk) 20:20, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Policies and guidelines Selfstudier (talk) 20:22, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

WP:PAGS Levivich (talk) 20:22, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks to you both. That is the second thing I have learnt re wiki these last days, the other being WP:BRIE, which when I sighted it, made me (a)wonder why wiki policy covers cheeses and (b) recalled to mind an idiom 'keep cheeso' once used at St Patrick's College, Ballarat in the halcyon days of 1960-1962. This idiom, which turns out not to be Australian dialect but a school argot, and cannot be explained by a net search, referred to 'cockatoos' -kids watching as sentinels for a group of boys who were breaking one of a number of iron rules against smoking, running a gambling ring or stealing from the tuckshop etc. If they saw a Christian brother in the offing they whispered 'cheeso' to alert us to stub our smokes or crawl out of the tuckshop window, and scamper. In sum, WP:BRIE reminds me of my delinquent youth, and perhaps goes someway towards explaining why so many think my behaviour remains atrocious into old age.:)Nishidani (talk) 20:37, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]