RationalWiki:Chicken coop/Archive84

Greenrd

@Spud @RWRW @LeftyGreenMario @DuceMoosolini @RoninMacbeth @Bongolian I propose promoting and maybe even banning @Greenrd for whitewashing articles on things associated with the alt-right, including defending his eugenics buddies. @Tobias and @D are sick of his shit, and frankly, his antics are disturbing the wiki, permaban him. — Oxyaena ^Harass 01:26, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

I should also stress his whitewashing of articles he doesn't like. Racist fucks like him don't deserve to be here, especially when they start injecting their shit into mainspace. — Oxyaena ^Harass 01:28, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

@Oxyaena It's generally a good idea to have links to actual examples of what you're complaining about regarding Greenrd's behavior. Bongolian (talk) 01:50, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

@Bongolian Have you not been paying attention to recent changes? I have. Look at his "improvements" of the Noah Carl article for example. — Oxyaena ^Harass 02:01, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

I completely agree with Ox, please view the earlier Coop page I made on Green providing the evidences. Tobias (talk) 02:11, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Read the Coop here that was copied to another article: Greenrd Coop. Tobias (talk) 02:13, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

While me and Mr Smith here don't always see eye to eye, I`m afraid he's right. Greenrd is a menace. — Oxyaena ^Harass 02:22, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Greenrd has since the start of April 2019 attempted to rewrite several articles to meet his point of view. this has caused many talk page warnings on User talk:Greenrd from multiple peeps. a previous coop case [1] (sysop view only) and disruption described in Talk:Nathan Cofnas and Talk:Alt-center

• he tried to whitewash the Alt-center article [2][3][4] with related talk in Talk:Alt-center and [5]
• he reclassified a large section of the Alt-right glossary as a new anti-SJW glossary [6][7] then added dubious information to Social justice warrior [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] which was partly reverted [17] added by Greenrd again [18] and reverted again [19]
• he tried to whitewash Nathan Cofnas article [20][21][22][23][24] which was reverted [25] added again [26] and reverted again [27] tried differently [28] and reverted again [29] with related talk in Talk:Nathan Cofnas
• he tagged Hereditarianism for no reason [30] tried to remove valid informations from the Jordan Peterson article [31] which was reverted [32] and did the same to Noah Carl [33] also reverted [34] and trolling Talk:Eric Turkheimer about hereditarianism [35] [36] after finding his edits reverted by many peeps and his talk page comments rebuked he declared rationalwiki a hive mind [37]

As u can see greenrd is very disruptive. EK (talk) 03:00, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for compiling all his disruptive and problematic edits, mostly whitewashing. I also raised the issue of Green being a racialist/hereditarian/eugenicist crank on the Nathan Cofnas talk. It's obviously a problem when someone with those dodgy views is editing articles related to those things since he's trying to remove criticisms. Green is friends with Cofnas and similar alt-right HBD people on his Twitter; he has tried multiple times to whitewash articles that criticise Cofnas.Tobias (talk) 03:12, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Note - the previous "coop case" about me was immediately closed and moved to the article talk page, I'm guessing because it was viewed at the time as not significant enough. So in my view, this my first "proper" coop, not my second. This is just a procedural point, just to make sure everyone voting is aware of the situation.--Greenrd (talk) 14:38, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Spud proposal

I recommend desysoping and prohibiting from editing any articles related to race or the alt-right. If he edits one of those articles again, he gets a ban. Spud (talk) 05:02, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Seconded. — Oxyaena ^Harass 05:11, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

I would support an edit ban on those topics where he has a conflict of interest but has he misused his ops in his whitewashing campaign? If not then I don't see grounds for promoting him. Quite frankly I think if youse are going to go to all of the fuss of a cooping we should just ban the racist motherfucker. --MtD^Bogan 06:12, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

This seems fair. Commie Lib (talk) 20:54, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

Greenrd defense/counter-proposal

Let me try to defend myself. I haven't misused my sysop tools, no. Attempting to rewrite articles to conform to our point of view is something we all do in some sense - I would characterise my behaviour more as "attempting to rewrite articles to remove dubious claims that I think are incorrect or not supported by sufficient evidence". Actually, I don't even do this in all cases where I find something that I think is dubious on RationalWiki: for example, I usually try to avoid removing or toning down Rationalwiki's criticism of hereditarianism about race, since I know that would probably get me in a lot of trouble, and I'm not an expert on hereditarianism so I'm not confident I would be getting things factually right while doing so. I try to focus on reversions that I feel confident enough about to be able to defend on talk pages.

I stand by the first edit I made to the alt-center article - I personally believe it was justified - I am a patron of Quillette on Patreon and I don't believe it is an alt-right publication, or I wouldn't be donating to it.

Moving some of the terms the alt-right page to the more general anti-SJW section of the SJW article from was something I tentatively felt qualified to do, being someone who has been a critical member of the anti-SJW community for years and someone who has researched the alt-right more than the average person. So I think I'm familiar with the terms I moved and how they are used and who by - though there were a couple which, as I noted on the talk page at the time, I was uncertain about and so I left on the alt-right page. I think I did the split of the glossary in a suitably cautious way, as I knew it was potentially going to be controversial - I raised it on the talk page first and left quite a bit of time for discussion; no-one objected to it, and in fact no-one has reverted the move itself at the time of writing, although as noted, one subsection in particular got removed - on which note:

I agree with the partial removal of content from the SJW article, on reflection: I did not think it through - it was a genuine mistake on my part. The text that was removed had inadvertently created the impression that understanding "racism" as "prejudice plus power" is the exclusive preserve of "SJWs", when in fact that meaning is used by mainstream and relatively sensible social justice advocates, not just extremists, who some (including me) label as "SJWs". I plan to reintroduce that section into Identity politics, where it probably belongs better, and moderate the tone of it slightly, where of course it can be edited into a more suitable form, or removed again, if it is felt to be badly-written.

The reason I made those edits to the Nathan Cofnas article was I read his response to his page, because he linked it from his Twitter which I follow, and my initial reaction was "hold on, this doesn't seem very fair - I do think RW are saying some inaccurate things about him, so I will go to his page and try to clean up some of the more egregious unsupported claims and see how I get on with that". I do see in retrospect that I was a bit too bull-in-a-china-shop in the way I went about it - I didn't quite have the sense of the community and what its reaction would be - I was misled by some comment that RW was more of a "polite discussion over tea and biscuits" sort of place, which hasn't been my experience of late. And I do acknowledge that Tobias subsequently moved the needle a bit in terms of providing a bit more evidence for some of the assertion I took issue with, although I've not (yet) changed my views. I would actually argue that it's good to have critics such as myself on the talk page of such articles - articles are likely to be more accurate if the talk page has some debate - as opposed to a situation where an article and its talk page where basically everyone agrees with each other and pats each other on the back and says how wonderful the article is - kind of thing.

It's simply not true that I tagged hereditarianism "for no reason"! If you look at my edit comment I said see the talk page, and the talk page did contain serious criticism of the article. In any case, surely tagging a page as inaccurate and misleading, something that was quickly reverted so it wasn't seen for very long, is a minor thing in the grand scheme of things? And I maintain that I did it in good faith, because I believe the page was seriously misleading as to what hereditarianism actually means - it does not mean someone necessarily believes in innate racial differences in intelligence or what have you. Though, since I am personally persuaded by the arguments I have seen outside RationalWiki arguing for innate racial differences in intelligence, I'm not personally too bothered by that inaccuracy, which is one of the reasons why I did not attempt to edit that article further (the other being, as noted above, I'm not an expert on the topic).

The claim that I removed "valid information" from the Jordan Peterson page has to be some kind of a joke, surely? How could anyone possibly know that his audience contains a lot of incels? Are there representative surveys of YouTube users that watch Jordan Peterson videos, that ask if they are virgins or members of the "incel" community? I would be very surprised if there were. I thought you guys would at least claim it was edgy humour - that would at least be a somewhat defensible argument, although I would still argue for its removal as I don't think that most readers would understand it was humour.

In closing, despite my use of the term "hive mind" on my user page with respect to RationalWiki editors (what I was getting at is, I do think the RationalWiki editorship is overwhelmingly of like mind on certain topics in practice, topics like Jordan Peterson and hereditarianism, and I don't think that is very controversial) I want to put this in context - I think over 99% of content I have seen on RationalWiki is really good, and even on the articles I have substantial disagreement with, there is still usually some really good content. So I have no wish to be banned or restricted, and I apologise for being disruptive, in terms of my controversial aggressive undoing of other people's work. To put my behaviour in context - not as an attempt to justify it, but to help you understand more about who I am - I'm dyspraxic and I have OCPD, which in my case manifests as thriving in an environment with clear rules (I tend to take things too literally more often than the average person due to my dyspraxia, and I am a rule-following personality due I think to my OCPD, or perhaps instead being very rule-following contributes towards my OCPD). So I have had zero formal conduct restriction on Wikipedia, which is an environment with loads of clear and detailed rules, and I've had some issues in online communities where there are much fewer clear rules, and enforcement of the community ethos is more about "common sense" and "judgement", such as RationalWiki. I would propose a more limited conduct restriction on myself - for 12 months, no editing of those kind of articles unless there is assent to the changes on the talk page, and no reversion/undoing of (other) sysops unless there is assent to the undoing on the talk page. --Greenrd (talk) 06:48, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

I haven't come to a fully formed opinion on this yet, but I would like to say that there are other ways of dealing with unsupported information in an article than just removing it. If a statement is about a living person and appears like it might be libelous without a supporting reference, then yes remove it. If this is not the case, then one can 1) add the citation-needed ({{cn}}) template following the statement or 2) look for a reference that supports or contradicts the statement or 3) add a new topic in the talk page. RationalWiki does try to be reasonable generally, but we are not a "polite discussion over tea and biscuits" society. We've had a history of some fairly cutthroat arguments (Palestine-Israel, for one). Bongolian (talk) 08:03, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Well the fact Green says he believes in the "innate racial differences in intelligence" as he put it above, is not entirely unexpected given his ongoing arguments on the subject here. There is no abuse of sysop tools and thus no real grounds to remove them, an editing restriction is vaguely possible but probably ineffective given that Green doesn't edit any articles except the topic affected. But then we haven't got to voting yet. — Dysk (contribs) 10:02, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

I support a modified version of Greenrd's edit restriction proposal. However, I would make the term indefinite rather than 12 months, and I'd clarify that violating that restriction could lead to unilateral de-sysoping/binning/blocking. I don't think this coop should end with a block/bin/promotion, but I do think this should be seen by Greenrd as the final warning. DuceMoosolini^{Your friendly RW dictator moderator} 13:02, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Desysop & ban, then I can create an article on Mr. Green. He's very similar to Nathan Cofnas. Do we really want hereditarians/racialists as editors, let alone sysops? From what I've already found about Green (since he uses the same username across internet), he's an absolute nutjob. You can find him posting about his support for eugenics on Reddit and he's in the same HBD circle as people like Cofnas, Noah Carl, Hbdchick etc. Tobias (talk) 13:21, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

We have and have had racists, conspiracy theorists and anti-science cranks as editors. We can't stop that since we're an open-edit wiki. It's just a matter of the mob deciding when the behavior of such editors becomes excessively bad that it warrants a reprimand. Bongolian (talk) 17:49, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

It's actually not true that I only edit articles related to the alt-right and race and articles of that sort. For example, I have also edited articles on economics and psychology. Also, when I edit articles about alt-right/far-right/alt-light/etc. individuals, it is often to criticise them. For example, I added probably the first mention on RationalWiki of Nathan Cofnas' critique of Kevin MacDonald's antisemitic conspiracy theory, in order to show up MacDonald as an antisemitic loon, and pointed out on Steve Bannon's article that he has cited a hardcore racist French book multiple times. Incidentally, I have also criticised alleged antisemites on the left in the Identity Politics article. Furthermore, I don't understand your argument that an edit restriction would be probably ineffective on me. I assure you that I would abide by any edit restriction.--Greenrd (talk) 21:18, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

There is a lot to look at in these accusations. Just looking at one thing, the Alt-center controversy, I won't say I agree with the changes Green made, but I will say the article concept is ostensibly incoherent to begin with. I am reminded of suspected communists in 1950s America. Green's violence to the equilibrium of the wiki is an issue. Bongolian is right that text should not be removed without discussion. Green needs to get a consensus for any changes he wants. He is trying to do too much without it. That is what he should be told. If he persists, penalties should follow. Ariel31459 (talk) 15:03, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

I totally agree, Bongolian - there are sometimes alternatives to just deleting dubious-sounding unreferenced/poorly-referenced claims about living persons on sight. You are right. I was perhaps a bit too quick off the trigger on this occasion. I do intend to be much more cautious when editing RationalWiki - and to make sure I think carefully before editing controversial topics on any wiki - in future.-Greenrd (talk) 21:38, 2 May 2019 (UTC)

Little surprise Green has admitted above to mental health issues. None of these basement dwelling "race realists" are normal people.Tobias (talk) 01:04, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

That is uncalled for, @Tobias. We should strive to judge people individually on their actions, not on their mental health issues, real or alleged. Bongolian (talk) 01:43, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

The problem here is that Greenrd is attempting to hamper RW's activity by removing uncited claims instead of providing citations, which is what he should be doing. Not just that, but RW is based on criticizing people like Peterson, and Greenrd does not seem to be in the business of whitewashing articles about non-rightwingers.Summa Atheologica (talk) 19:56, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

It depends whether citations can be found, of course. If I know how to go look for them, and I can find them without too much effort, then sure, I should go find them, think "oh, the claim actually is true after all", and add them. And if I don't find any, I should report back that on the talk page and query the uncited claim on that basis, if I think it might be incorrect.

As for Peterson, I was not really defending Peterson himself, who I think has many super-bad opinions like climate change denial and being extremely dismissive of young people's ideas, but his audience, which I think we can't assume is necessarily as, um, weird as Peterson himself. There was an interesting short video by The Guardian which showed that some of the people who actually went to Peterson's talk in London were people like Jeremy Corbyn supporters (like me) or communists, who didn't always agree with Peterson but found his "political incorrectness" refreshing, which I really did not expect. I mean, I occasionally watch Peterson for his commentary on feminism, which I don't always agree with, so that makes me part of his audience in a peripheral way, so I felt almost-but-not-quite personally attacked by the claim, and other people who similarly occasionally watch Peterson on YouTube might feel the same and be deterred from reading the article or RationalWiki any further. But I realise now that maybe the main point of the claim or joke or whatever it is (I'm not entirely sure) about his audience was to discredit him by association. If that's the case, I think it would end up reflecting badly on RationalWiki's reputation as much as his, by making people who don't believe it, see RationalWiki as a less reliable source of information, and by making people who do believe it, annoy Peterson fans and then if they hear that they got this idea that they are all incels or whatever from RationalWiki, that could make them have a knee-jerk reaction against RationalWiki, which would be bad. But this is just how I see it playing out and is purely my intuition about it.

I see politics as more accurately represented by a cube with maybe 3 dimensions (the 2 dimensions of the political compass, economic views and the authoritarian-libertarian axis, plus an extra axis for non-economic social justice) whereas you seem to see it as more of a simple spectrum between left and right, so for me, politics is more complicated than just "is it right-wing? If so, oppose it." But obviously, politics and religion are two of the most controversial topics in the world, so if I think an edit might cause a dispute due to its politically controversial nature, and especially if I think I might have a minority viewpoint in that dispute, I should be cautious and discuss first.

But all that is about presenting a political view we can all accept (or at least the dominant majority can accept), whereas the two examples you are talking about are actually primarily questions of fact - are Peterson fans disproportionately incels, and is this or that writer really correctly described as anti-feminist? And yes, there are political questions about where we draw the lines with certain labels, of course. But we shouldn't forget about being factually correct in all this. And yes, I absolutely would open a discussion about a non-right-winger if I thought they were being unfairly criticised by RationalWiki in some unique-to-RationalWiki way - or at all, perhaps, if I felt strongly about the unfairness - but I don't encounter that often on RationalWiki.--Greenrd (talk) 21:49, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Some editors here conflate balanced with accuracy. They say "we don't have to be balanced," but what that sometimes amounts to is "we don't have to be accurate." Yes, you can get into trouble by trying to be accurate, usually because trying to be accurate is sometimes called whitewashing. For example, most people here don't want to read anything positive about Jordan Peterson. One gets used to it after a while.

RW's joke detector has detected jokes in the following. Warning:Humor levels may vary. Please don't say,"This is a joke, right?" or act like this is serious on the talk page.

Sometimes you can outlast the infidels. Ariel31459 (talk) 22:24, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Vote

Do nothing

1. Greenrd admits he could have handled the incidents in question better and has stated a willingness to improve in the future. I see no need for further action at this time. ☭Comrade GC☭^{Ministry of Praise} 14:52, 4 May 2019 (UTC)
2. I don't personally see any need to ban Greenrd or even to invent some arcane edit restriction. I trust that he will be a bit more careful when it comes to dealing with certain topics that he may be interested in, but he is engaging in debate rather than just warring over it. — Dysk (contribs) 16:48, 4 May 2019 (UTC)
3. and so forth...Ariel31459 (talk) 18:04, 4 May 2019 (UTC)
4. I'm satisfied with this. DuceMoosolini^{Your friendly RW dictator moderator} 18:11, 4 May 2019 (UTC)
5. I agree. Bongolian (talk) 20:09, 4 May 2019 (UTC)
6. Sure. — Oxyaena ^Harass 21:00, 4 May 2019 (UTC)