User:PeterKa

My pages:

• Read my parody of Wikipedia's gender categories affair
• My Arbcom appeal has a blow-by-blow account of what happened during my time on Wikipedia.
• Diacritic — This is a zippy overview of the most controversial aspect of my editing.
• Diacritics proposal — You can find a detailed set of arguments here.

My time at Wikipedia

Back in 2012, I was a senior editor on Wikipedia and could boast tens of thousands of edits as well as a clean eight-year track record. I was especially active in a forum called “requested moves.” One day, an editor I will refer to as “IIO” began picking fights with me. Day after day, he complained about me in one forum after another. He put an astonishing amount of time and energy into harassing and stalking me, apparently jealous of my unofficial status as "RM expert." After a full year of this, the powers that be decided that the simplest solution was to ban me. The banning discussion that followed was obviously rigged. It was full of people I'd never heard of up to that point, as well as other people who knew me only because IIO had recruited me. They must have been canvassed together. There was little if any effort to make a coherent argument against me. Not a single diff was presented -- a diff being Wikipedia's version of evidence.

Day after day, he complained about me in one forum after another. After a year of this, some admins summarily imposed a series of blocks. Wikipedia has hundreds of admins, and they can block as they like, a power they need to deal with spammers and trolls. But an editor who has been around for a while generally receives some degree of due process and procedural protection, including second chances, topic bans, and interaction bans. I never even got a warning, although this is standard procedure even for beginning users.

The original block arose from a dispute as to whether the city of Can Tho should be spelled with diacritics, as the Vietnamese spell it, or without, as English-language reference works give it. When IIO is not picking a fight with me, he edits music and art articles, and not Vietnam-related material. The Can Tho move was something that happened nine months earlier and didn’t involve him. To get this block, IIO had to go from one admin to another to another selling his cause, a practice referred to as “forumshopping.”

Why diacritics? Wikipedia's leadership likes to present itself as being above mere style disputes, so there isn't much straight talk on this issue. But whatever the reason, Arbcom was at this time cracking down on editors with dissent views on the funny squiggles. Wikipedia guidelines instruct editors to follow “the general usage” on this question. I interpret this to mean that we should follow the Chicago Manual, Merriam-Webster, or some other widely-used reference work. Although these works do give the names of people and places from various countries with diacritics, this is not the case for Vietnam. (See my handy chart for details.) IIO argues that this approach discriminates against Vietnamese, as if this was a civil rights issue. (Before anyone takes this argument seriously, I should note that IIO is French and that English-language websites run by the Vietnamese government also remove the diacritics.) A good style is one that goes unnoticed so that a reader can focus on content. Few English speakers are familiar with Vietnamese diacritics, so they stand out in running text. If the dominate thought the reader goes away with is, “Gee, those Vietnamese use a lot of interesting marks,” that’s a failure of communication.

My case was discussed in ANI several times. Each time, the “consensus,” as it is called, was not to sanction me. At the time, I thought I’d won the battle. But later it turned out that the only reason these decisions were respected is because there was an active admin who protected me. Once he took a break from editing, an ANI consensus and fifty cents was worth a telephone call. In the offensive that followed, many more editors became involved, few of whom were familiar with Vietnam-related issues. The offensive started with an attack on an article I wrote on the Roman Warm Period led by William Connolly, a climate troll and one of Wikipedia's most famous editors. I assume IIO recruited him somehow. This time the emphasis was on crude insults and name calling. It continued with an attack on my user page and on an article I wrote on Sino-Vietnamese characters. None of that succeeded in provoking me into doing anything I could be blocked for. In the end, Team Harassment had to use a transparently bogus claim that I was edit warring as a pretext.

Sue Gardner, executive director at the time, was intent on moving Wikipedia to the left.[1] To IIO and the rest of Team Harassment, the fact that I had narrowly escaped sanction earlier was reason enough to try again. Since Gardner left Wikipedia in May 2014, other victims of the great diacritics purge have returned to active editing. Compared to people who were more easily provoked, I was more trouble to block and ban. Reinstating me at this point would require too many admins to backtrack. In the months after I was banned, well over a thousand articles were moved to diacritic and otherwise non-English titles.

People who should know have told me that Arbcom started manipulating my case behind the scenes well before I was banned. That would certainly help explain why so many editors became interested in my case at that time. If so, Arbcom effectively overrode the various ANI discussions that had gone in my favor. Arbcom is set up as a quasi judicial body, so it is irregular for the group to act in a case that was not appealed.

What I have written

• Nazarene‎, J. Frank Norris, Peter Ruckman, Textus Receptus, sensus plenior, divine accommodation, Yule, Johannine Comma, Codex Washingtonianus, Star of Bethlehem, Fundamentalism, Tertiary, Andy McIntosh

• Republicans (Jeffersonian), Classical Chinese, Empress Dowager Cixi, diacritic, Mandarin, Nuclear option, Star_Trek_franchise#Political_themes, Tang Tuyet Minh, Roman Warm Period, No Gun Ri, Vietcong, Republic of China, rule of law, YAD06, Girls' Generation, Xia dynasty, Shang dynasty, rule of law