Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/AndriyK

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Case Opened on 01:54 (UTC), 28 November 2005

Case Closed on 04:20, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Please do not edit this page directly unless you wish to become a participant in this request. (All participants are subject to Arbitration Committee decisions, and the ArbCom will consider each participant's role in the dispute.) Comments are very welcome on the Talk page, and will be read, in full. Evidence, no matter who can provide it, is very welcome at /Evidence. Evidence is more useful than comments.

Arbitrators will be working on evidence and suggesting proposed decisions at /Workshop and voting on proposed decisions at /Proposed decision.

Contents

[edit] Involved parties

[edit] Complaining witnesses

[edit] Nominal defendant

[edit] Supporters of AndriyK

[edit] Neutral comment

[edit] Statement by complaining witnesses

This arbitration request by users Irpen, Ezhiki and other Wikipedians that co-signed above is against user AndriyK, who on numerous occasions engaged in extreme POV pushing, disruptive behavior, personal attacks on and off Wikipedia, copyright violations, and effective vote falsification by using outside forums to recruit followers and sockpuppets for voting and assistance in revert warring to circumvent the 3RR policy. User also engaged in bad faith moves and redirect creations in multiple steps making them hard to undo (thus abusing the features of wikisoftware). The user also refuses to cooperatively work on issues with which parties are in disagreement and shows lack of civility when attempts for constructive discussions are made.

[edit] Statements by parties

[edit] Statement by Ezhiki

Please limit your statement to 500 words

On October 27, 2005, AndriyK unilaterally moved the articles Mikhail of Chernigov and Oleg of Chernigov to new titles ([1], [2]). Later this day, User:Mzajac posted requests to have the articles moved back ([3], [4]). Because the first votes cast were overwhelmingly in support of the move, AndriyK posted a message on an outside Ukrainian forum ([5]), which not only called for all interested Ukrainians to register Wikipedia accounts and vote regarding the articles’ moves, but also classified opposing parties as "Russian mafia" (http://www2.maidan.org.ua/n/free/1130025302). English translations of the posts are available here and here. The result of the posts was an inflow of Ukrainian voters—enough to create an illusion of greater opposition than it otherwise would be—whose only goal was to support AndriyK’s POV. As per Wikipedia:Sock puppet, "these newly created accounts... may be friends of a Wikipedian, or may be related in some way to the subject of an article under discussion. These accounts are not actually sockpuppets, but they are difficult to distinguish from real sockpuppets and are treated similarly." We are, therefore, requesting that the results of the votes are reconsidered and appropriate measures are applied to AndriyK so this kind of behavior does not repeat in future. The following is a list of possible sockpuppets (or accounts that can be treated as such per Wikipedia:Sock puppet definition above) used to skew the vote results:

On Mikhail of Chernihiv:

The official result of the vote was: "support"—14, "oppose"—20. Adjusted for possible sockpuppets, the result is: "support"—14, "oppose"—10.

On Oleg of Chernihiv:

The official result of the vote was: "support"—15, "oppose"—17. Adjusted for possible sockpuppets, the result is: "support"—15, "oppose"—8.

As per results of the vote, the move was not completed. At this point of time, despite the fact that the vote was only in regards the title of the article, AndriyK is engaged in revert wars that change all internal article references from "Chernigov" to "Chernihiv". Other editors feel that this is a completely separate issue which should be dealt separately. AndriyK disagrees, and uses his "allotment" of three reverts per article almost on the daily basis (see [6] and [7] for examples). The user had been previously blocked for 3RR violations ([8]), and is now extremely cautious not to overstep the technical limits of this policy, while definitely breaking its spirit.

[edit] Other users comments to the statement by User:Ezhiki
I am a real Wikipedia user, just a newbie. I currently work on my first article on Ukrainian Wikipedia. Please remove me from these lists. -- Yalovets 02:39, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
Dear Yalovets. The only reason you were identified by my as a possible sockpuppet is because your account properties match the sockpuppet definition available at Wikipedia:Sock puppet. Please do not take the fact that you are listed above as an accusation. This RfAr is not against you. If ArbComm determines that your account is not a sockpuppet one, I am ready to publicly apologize, if that would make feel you better. I have no intention of making you feel unwelcome here.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 01:53, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
Would like to add to this, that the statement of User:Ezhiki is nothing but a personal attack against other editors. The people who contributed to the vote should not be judged in bad faith. Many of them don't even know that they are being badmouthed in absentia. User:Ezhiki has not tried to contact these users prior to posting their names. There was not even an attepmt to confirm the accusation of sock puppetting. This seems like a general disregard of the rules of Wikipedia. --Andrew Alexander 04:51, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
Andrew, filing an RfAr is not a "personal attack", it's a right every Wikipedian (you included) has. Furthermore, this RfAr is not against the users listed above, it's against AndriyK. The only reason the users above are identified as possible sockpuppets is because of the combination of their editing history, editing patterns, and timing of their joining of Wikipedia. I very well realize that I could have misidentified a few of them and that some may indeed be (and are) real people acting on their own. However, even in this case, they do fall under the definition of a sockpuppet, as per Wikipedia:Sock puppet (please refer to the policy quote available in my statement above).—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 01:53, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
Please read this: "However, simply having made few edits is not evidence of sockpuppetry on its own,". Have you tried to email those people? Have you requested to check their ip addresses?--Andrew Alexander 06:06, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
You are right, it's all about the evidence. This RfAr is, among other things, an attempt to collect such evidence. So to answer your questions: one—no, I have not tried to contact these users (because the case is not against them, and I am not accusing them of anything). Two—yes, I have requested to check their IP addresses, but that is hard without having an RfAr in place. So here we go.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 15:31, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

Disclamer from MaryMaidan: I have read the definition of a sockpuppet, and I can assure you, AndrijK has not invented me, I do indeed exist. I am one of the administrators of the site www.maidan.org.ua (you can confirm that sending an e-mail straight to me mary@maidanua.org or to the administration admin@maidanua.org). I have not been contributing a lot to English wikipedia, as we have been busy translating one cool program into Ukrainian (see the process here http://www2.maidan.org.ua/n/mova/1132045021 and the resulf here http://maidan.org.ua/wiki/index.php/PledgeBank). Having said that, I am insisting, that the edits I have made made the articles in Wikipedia more truthful, if there is such thing as thruth, of course. --MaryMaidan 23:39, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

First of all I must say that Wikipedia's not my virtual home, I mean it's not the place where I spend my time online. I'm a real person, but I don't edit/add here anything everyday. But I came here to vote against Russificated names for contemporary Ukrainian towns/cities. I aint know Andriy_K personally. He did cast the call for Ua users to support the pro-ukrainian initiative. And I (and others) did it right by voting against Russian names. And what really surprised me about Wikipedia is this anti-ua flow of accuses/slandering. Just thinking logically — Ukrainian towns must have Ukrainian names. Down with some chronicles of XVI or IX centuries, or whatever era they belong to. What are they mentioned for? We're talking about contemporary Ukrainian cities/towns, and there are no CherniGOV there, only Chernihiv. That's it. And last thing - dear non Russian-speaking users! You're being made a victim of the Russian imperial chauvinism (I thought it was a lie, but certain events, including those happened in Wikipedia's votes around Chernihiv, proved this danger real). Why? Because you're being told that there are such towns in Ukraine as "chernigov", "Irpen" etc. In fact there are NO SUCH TOWNS HERE. So you're being misled by these Russian English-speaking users. Decide yourself how you wanna be further. Paul Kiss http://paulkiss.forever.kz/

[edit] Statement by party 2 (User:Irpen)

Additionally to the vote fraud listed in the statement by Ezhiki, these two moves have another peculiar feature that they share with more than a dozen of other page moves made by the user. When moving articles, AndriyK uses a sneaky trick making use of the features of Wikisoftware to make a reversal of his moves burdensome, thus requiring an WP:RM vote, which he thinks he will be able to falsify using the above tactics.

ALL of his moves starting from October 24, 2005 (Severyn Nalivaiko → Severyn Nalyvaiko) are done in the following bad faith three steps procedure: (1) Move the article, (2) Go to a redirect with an older name and damage it by adding a typo, and (3) Correct a typo back. Thus, the redirect now has its own history and the article cannot be moved back without WP:RM votes that he expects to flood with sockpuppets and/or followers recruited from internet forums.

This is the list of articles moved in such fashion: (1) Nalyvayko, (2) Bohun, (3) Southern Buh, (4) a subway line, (5) another subway line, (6) yet another subway line, (7) Oleg of Chernigov followed by a VOTE FRAUD (note discussion and number of red link voters or 2-3 edit voters), (8) Mikhail of Chernigov followed by another VOTE FRAUD, (9) Vsevolod Svyatoslavich (moved further later and his harm thus corrected), (10) Mongol invasion of Russia (sensible move but still in same bad faith manner), (11) Igor Svyatoslavich, see also the deletion log caused by an admin cleaning it up on his own, (12) Russian architecture (restored by an admin who cleaned it up on his own initiative [9], note move time Oct 28, 8:09 and check deleted log for three edits by AndriyK at 8:09-8:10), (13) Petro Mohyla, (14) Trubezh river, (15) Battle of the Stugna River.

Please note an identical pattern in all these moves.

His earlier fraud included multiple moving by cut and paste: (1) Russkaya pravda [10], repeated here, and here, (2) Siverians was cut and pasted twice, see history.

Also, when an article already exists uder the name he likes, he smartly creates the redirects from the name he assumes others might want to move it to and not only he creates redirects from those names, but creates them in the same subtle way (in two steps: a wrong redirect + correction). Now, that a redirect has a history, the move over redirect cannot be made. An example is Severian Principality entry created as a redirect to Siverian Principality he was writing, but again, in two steps to prevent the move to a name he dislikes [11]. Similar redirects were created from all other Russian names and all in two steps to make sure a redirect has a history and cannot be moved over: (1) Principality of Severia, (2) Novgorod Severskiy Principality, (3) Novgorod-Severskiy Principality, (4) Novgorod Seversky Principality, (5) Principality of Novgorod Severskiy, (6) Principality of Novgorod Seversky, (7) Principality of Novgorod-Seversky, (8) Principality of Novgorod-Severskiy. Similarly, he took and existing redirect Chernigov → Chernihiv and to make sure it is not moved back (though no one was going to) he added a blank line to it [12] so that the redirect would have a history.

Interesting was to see his reaction when I noticed the Peter Mogila's move first and mentioned it at his talk, hoping to shame him or just to check whether he would admit or pretend that it was an "innocent" mistake (I was not sure at the time that it was a bad-faith redirect as much as I am now when I saw an entire pattern). When talking to him, I brought up that I was considering moving Polkovnyk he created to a Ukrainian colonel but I did not do that unilaterally because it is just a courtesy to warn the interested parties of any moves so that they can voice any disagreements. Interestingly, his reaction was (as I assumed it would be) an immediate creation of two redirects Ukrainian Colonel and Ukrainian colonel and BOTH were created in a similar fashion, in two steps, to make a move there impossible. Please see these histories and check them step by step: [13] and [14]. This time he "forgot" the bracket in the first attempt and "corrected" that in the second one.

As for his response, he could not deny it (like he couldn't deny vote fraud earlier, always ignoring my pointing it out many times to him). One time our dialog turned especially amusing when he turned that on me and said that he learned these tricks from me (he had nothing more to say being embarrassed). Check this dialog:

To see this hypocrisy right after your "respect your colleagues" call is rather amusing. --Irpen

I learned it from you: to use different rules in different cases. As you mentioned above, I do learn fast. ;)--AndriyK

...You left me speechless hear. Not only you cheat but you take pride in that. --Irpen

You don't like of other people bahave like you? Why? :)--AndriyK

See this for complete context.

Also, interesting was how he was responding to these issues earlier. When I wrote to him long time ago that "Moving articles should be done with care in cases where you may expect disagreement since it it much more difficult to undo", he responded cynically: "I just follow Wikipedia Guidelines, so I do not expect any disagreement.". See this.

The main conclusion is that he is not a short-tempered but possibly productive fellow, but he is a cynical and experienced POV pusher and no wonder: he came from another language wikipedia, well experienced and he knew exactly what he was doing.

To summarize his behaviour shown above, it includes:

  1. bad faith potentially disagreeable moves with no discussion or in spite of discussion where other people seemed ambivalent to impose their vision on article names and kept discussing on what to do;
  2. abuse of the Wikisoftware features to avoid move reversion to make sure his moves prevail;
  3. abuse of Wikisoftware features to avoid his article moved for the same reason;
  4. Moves by cut and paste when he could not get it his way by "Move articles" and calling those who reverted him "Vandals".

As for the revert warring, this question from him at the help-desk speaks much. Here he is looking for the info on how to get on everyone's nerves without getting himself in trouble.

The most typical of his sockpuppets or just recruited blind followers is user:Dovbush. One can see from his contributions what a productive account this is.

I respectfully request the ArbCom to consider the following remedies in addition or in place of whatever ban is appropriate:

  1. administrative reversal of all his article moves done in 3 steps (including those where WP:RM voting was falsified) so that the proposals to move could be discussed by everyone without the threat of bullying
  2. limiting him to 1 revert per 24 h instead of 3 (he is permanently just one step under 3 RR at several articles),
  3. personal attacks probation,
  4. possibly, ban from several articles and/or topics altogether (for some time).

--Irpen 21:43, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Addendum by Irpen

My statement above is a simple documenting of AndriyK's behavior. I know, it exceeded the space of 500 words but this was only because the intensity of AndriyK's warfare and fraudulent behavior was so high that it took this much space to present it to ArbCom. I would just like to add quickly the following.

First of all, multiple attempts to engage him into cooperation and discussion have been made by me and by others despite his horrific badmouthing of me at Ukrainian Wikipedia (even with the use of the B-word next to my Wiki-name) and a loud slander campaign at Maidan (a Ukrainian political activism site). I was willing to put this behind and his talk page documents my attempts to work with this editor.

Second, the attempt to present this a Russian Wiki-mafia trying to gang-bang a newcomer who tried to give a Ukrainian perspective is simply wrong. Please note that of many editors that co-signed this arbitration, four are the active editors of the Ukrainian wiki-community who are active at Ukrainian portal and in the Ukrainian topics. User:Mzajac contributed to Ukrainian topics probably more than any other Wiki-editor, User:Sashazlv, with another editor, wrote the only Ukraine-related featured article to this date (the Hero of Ukraine), user:Fisenko and myself (user:Irpen) were active in Ukrainian topics for a while and all of us were able to argue a Ukrainian perspective in many topics with Russian and Polish editors. Yes, Ukraine is under-represented at Wikipedia, but there was little bad faith in the behavior of our neighbors and the atmosphere was mostly of respect and collaboration.

Finally, please note that the action requested from the ArbCom will not curb the ability of AndriyK to contribute to Wikipedia by writing articles and adding info to existing articles. Only a verdict that would disallow such disruptive behavior as mass name changes in the texts of the articles from the more established names in the literature to the ones that suite AndriyK's particular taste, sockpuppeting (if established) and revert warring is requested, together with a single real restriction on this user, that is a ban to move articles and create redirects. At least, with his past pattern he cannot be trusted with the article moves and he should be required to propose such drastic measures before performing them. At the same time, it is justly requested that his past bad-faith moves are undone for further review and discussion since they cannot be undone without an administrative action due to the dirty tricks he used. He should be either banned from moving articles for a while or be required to propose the moves first, at least, because it is in this activity he created so much hassle and this is the activity he conducted using unethical tricks. Proposing the potentially disagreeable moves before imposing them is generally considered a common sense rule anyway, and he should be required to stick to the common sense rule if his personal ethics is insufficient to give him an idea of whether a particular move would be viewed as controversial or not. Moreover, his using a wikisoftware trick to make his moved non-revertible makes me believe strongly that he knew that the moves might meet an opposition and he went ahead with them to force his POV without seeking a consensus. His cynical response that he didn't expect any disagreement, that's why should be taken into account.

As for the suspected sockpuppetry, should it be established that AndriyK uses sockpuppet accounts, a broader ruling as per Zivinbudas precedent is respectfully requested to make ArbCom decisions applicable to any anonymous or sockpuppet-like accounts that exhibit trademark immature Ukrainian nationalism through enforcing particular names over the established ones without seeking the consensus from the community.

--Irpen 08:29, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Comment to the statement by party 2 (User:Irpen)

I must stress that User:Irpen cut the dialog he cited to destort its meaning. I found it reasonable to copy the complete context here to make it clear where I was joking and were I was speaking seriously.

I learned it from you: to use different rules in different cases. As you mentioned above, I do learn fast. ;)--AndriyK 17:55, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
If seriosly, unique and clear rules have to be established. Otherwise we'll always have such discussions.--AndriyK 17:56, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
You left me speachless hear. Not only you cheat but you take pride in that. --Irpen 17:59, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
You don't like of other people bahave like you? Why? :)--AndriyK 18:01, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
That's just ridiculous, AndriyK. However, thanks to the Wikisoftware, all the history is preserved and anyone can judge who did what! --Irpen 18:03, 15 November 2005 (UTC)
This is precisely what I mean.--AndriyK 18:04, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

(Copied from [15]). As you see, the bold pharse, reflecting my true opinion was not cited by Irpen. So he has tried to present my jokes as an evidence of improper behavior. A clear example of cheating.--AndriyK 15:24, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

It must be added that User Irpen has engaged on multiple occasions in personal attacks as well as attacks against Ukrainian related articles. For instance, he has reverted multiple times the article Holodomor, trying to erase the words "Ukrainian genocide" and the references to the findings of the US Government Commission on the Ukrainian Famine (e.g. [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], he then accused me of "extreme nationalism" on Talk:Holodomor). His desire to limit other side's editing priveleges seems nothing but another step in his revert war with the people that don't share his political views. This arbitration setup alone shows this. Instead of inviting both sides of the dispute in equal proportion, he invites almost exclusively a few allies of the revert wars here to "punish" one of his opponenta. So the people not sharing the "correct" political agenda must find out about this only by accident. A fare vote and consultations must be held prior to making any decisions in this case. Otherwise, a small group of editors will limit the neutral point of view.--Andrew Alexander 04:21, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

Dear Andrew Alexander. The issue about Holodomor, is a narrow one and related to a specific article rather than to this arbitration. Since you brought it here, I will just say that this was not about removal of the term from the article but about keeping the discussion about the term within a section specifically devoted to it. You insisted to bring it into the lead paragraph or even the very first line, and it is disputable whether the term belongs there. However, this ArbCom filing is not about the merit of AndriyK's or his opponents' positions in specific article disputes. This is about his behavior, particularly, frivolous page moves, bad-faith redirect creation, copyvios, using 3RR as daily "alottment" or using tricks to circumvent it, vote fraud, sockpuppetry and other mischief. If you want to accuse the compliants of this case in any policy or ethical violations, you are welcome to start 1, 2, 3 or more RfC's or even file your own ArbCom case(s). Finally, keep your remarks within your own statement, that is if you are entitled for one of which I am not sure, but I don't mind it anyway. --Irpen 08:10, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
Irpen, please do not try to mislead. You have not moved the quotes and references elsewhere in the article, you bluntly deleted them. The diffs show it very well. The comment is relevant since it demonstrates your bias and violations of WP policies in your revert warfare. This arbitration seems to be just another level of that warfare. You mislead in your accusations just as much as you mislead in your denials of reference deletions. I've seen you using your "allotment" of 3RR fairly regularly. I also disagree with your definitions of "vote fraud" and "frivolous page moves".--Andrew Alexander 09:05, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
I did not move Genocide elsewhere in the article, because it was already there. There was a section called "Was Holodomor a Genocide?".
You should have added your refs there or to the ref section and not to the lead. In any case, don't waste an ArbCom space for issues unrelated to AndriyK's behavior which this is all about. You are welcome to start an RfC or an ArbCom against me or all complaints in this case if you see anyone behavior warrants it. You can express your disagreement over the applicability of "Fraud" and "frivolous" to his page moves in your own statement here, if you are entitled for one. What matters is whether the ArbCom agrees or disagrees, seeing the evidence above. --Irpen 09:23, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
Of course you deleted all those quotes and references. Several times. Stop misleading please.--Andrew Alexander 04:48, 26 November 2005 (UTC)
There alway was and still is a section in the article Holodomor#Was_the_Holodomor_genocide.3F. I repeatedly objected just to your using the lead to inject all your ideas at once and requested you to use an appropriate section. See for example this edit of mine supplied with a summary "remove from lead what don't belong there. Hey, there are sections for that and it is discussed there already". However, in any case what does it have to do with AndriyK's behavior? If you think it is an arbitrable issue, I welcome you to start an another ArbCom re my behavior at Holodomor. You could also start with the user RfC (against me) or the article RfC (Holodomor). Or you are just trying to make this page as confusing as possible by bringing as much irrelevant stuff here as you can? --Irpen 05:04, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

This discussion is out of place here. Anyone who is interested is welcome to check mine and others' comments at Talk:Holodomor#Kuban, Talk:Holodomor#Changes_by_alexander, Talk:Holodomor#Holodomor_Investigation_Commission_Unproven_Bias. But most importantly, please see this Reminder. --Irpen 06:11, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

Andrew, I think it would save ArbComm some time and would be beneficial overall if you provided specific links to diffs, as Irpen did in his statement. Also, arbitration is not a "setup". It's the last resort at conflict resolution. I would recommend you spend a bit more time studying Wikipedia policies and procedures if you intend yourself to be taken seriously in matters like this one—it would benefit both parties.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 01:59, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

Thanks at least for not calling me a "sockpuppet".--Andrew Alexander 02:57, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Statement by party 3 (User:Ghirlandajo)

In my experience, AndriyK is a highly skilled, determined, and cold-blooded revert warrior. His edits consist of little in the way of constructive editing. As he was repeatedly blocked for 3RR violatiion in the past, he evolved several sophisticated tricks to eschew the rule. Most notably, he recruited ua.wiki supporters whose only contribution to this project has been endless reverting. For example, when AndriyK is close to violating 3RR, there appears a certain user:Dovbush (his name was red-linked yesterday, but Andriy added a comment to his user page to eliminate red-linking) who assaults exactly the same pages and makes exactly the same edits as Andriy did: cf. Dovbuzh's contributions with Andriy's.

It is worth noting that AndriyK seems to prefer to assault those pages that were written by me and/or Irpen. One instructive example is Russian architecture, which it took me infinite pains to write almost single-handedly, from the first line to the last. AndriyK, despite having been informed about a need to consult other editors about such decisive moves, did move the article on architectural traditions of Kievan Rus, Muscovy, Imperial Russia and Soviet Union to Architecture of Rus. I fail to see any rationale behind such controversial and inflammatory actions other than deliberately stirring discord. As a result of his actions, there had been two completely identical articles - Russian architecture and Architecture of Rus - until an admin reverted his move back to normalcy. Thereupon AndriyK and his crony User:Andrew Alexander attempted to delete some sections from the article without contributing as much as one new line. Neither did they heed an advise to write a separate article on Ukrainian architecture. As a result, the article was protected by an admin from further disruptive editing by deletionists.

What turns AndriyK's edits to a nightmare for other editors is a wide extent of his disruptive editing. He is capable of reverting from 60 to 80 articles in an hour (example), which takes efforts of many users and quite some time to undo. Endless revert wars instigated by Andriy effectively ruined history records of many pages started or written by me and/or Irpen (e.g., Oleg of Chernihiv, Mikhail of Chernihiv, Chernihiv).

As AndriyK has devised several strategies to avoid violating 3RR, I second Irpen's request for the following remedies to be applied in this case:

  • administrative reversal of all his article moves done in 3 steps (including those where WP:RM voting was falsified) so that the proposals to move could be discussed by everyone without the threat of bullying
  • limiting him to 1 revert per 24 h instead of 3 (he is permanently just one step under 3 RR at several articles),
  • personal attacks probation,
  • possibly, ban from several articles and/or topics altogether (for some time). --Ghirlandajo 08:44, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Addendum by party 3

In my opinion, AndriyK's continued revert warring, now when his case was submitted to arbitration, indicates his lack of respect for the arbitration committee and for established procedures of dispute resolution.--Ghirlandajo 09:50, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Comments of other users to the statement by party 3

A few "spicy" comments by "unbiased" User:Ghirlandajo.
16:30, 11 November 2005 Ghirlandajo m (restored deletions by a racist)
16:16, 11 November 2005 Ghirlandajo (rv vandalism: if you continue messing the article with its talk page, you will be reported!)
07:47, 11 November 2005 Ghirlandajo m (huh, lost your medkit again?)
22:11, 21 November 2005 Ghirlandajo m (rvv another revert warrior) -- that warrior wasn't as strong. User:Ghirlandajo performed an astonishing number of reverts, beating many, many people.--Andrew Alexander 09:14, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Statement by party 4 (Gnomz007)

Since his entry AndriyK has demonstrated a pattern of distrust towards other users, instead of discussing his concerns about Ukrainian topics, he just went ahead and made mass-moves, and other potentially disagreeable edits.

While I do not have enough confidence in my knowledge of Ukrainian language to put it on my user page, I can pretty much understand the content of his messages on Maidanua.org, he accused many editors of being part of something "very much like a teenager gang".

In one message, where he scrutinized the edits of other users [21] with quite offensive comments, he said that he reckons than he has no other choice but to use the methods of his perceived gang on Wikipedia.

He continually bullied several other users, motivating it by what he considers spreading of anti-Ukrainian propaganda by them.

Bemoaning the "Russian mafia", he made an attempt to explain to forum patrons the rules of Wikipedia, largely unsuccessfully, since he omitted the main principles, he urged to take care of POV, while not explaining what it means becoming an editor. And since he pointed finger at the sources of POV, his crusade aggravated many editors and in itself a serious bad-faith accusation.

While he is concerned with what he cosiders monopoly on POV, what he effectively does is replacing it by another monopoly on POV, beacause he bruteforced many things.

He did spectacular amounts of reverts, I have just a few of those articles on my watchlist, but the reverts popped regularly every day.

I think that he believes in what he does, but ignorant of Wikipedia workings, and lacks trust into the usual procedures of Wikipedia, which causes him to exercise his allowances left and right, which largely violates WP:POINT.

–Gnomz007(?) 06:59, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Statement by party 5 (User:Halibutt)

(Please limit your statement to 500 words)

[edit] Statement by party 6 (User:Kuban kazak)

To be fair I am really dissapointed with AndriyK. Numerous times I was working on articles when AndriK would barge in and change everything without prior discussion. The strory with Kiev Metro is such when even though I asked him to refrain from further changes in transliteration, he nevertheless changed them. Now writing templates is an impossible task since he somehow locked the original spelling to avoid its revert. Also is his taste for ommition of facts that do not coincide with his nationalistic tastes. Such example is St. Vladimir's Cathedral where for nearly two weeks he spent deleting all the relevant articles, and without prior agreement at discussions. A similar situation can be found in the Cossack article where he kept on deleting my addtions. The Holodomor is also such a case where distputable sources were included before an agreement was reached. I have numerously tried to incourage AndriyK to actually start writing articles (which he on numerous occasions claimed was his reason for coming here). My suggestion of having something simple was met with profound rudeness (and hidden behind it - lasiness) as it can be witnessed in the Drogobych and Izmail Oblast heading at his talk page. I have also reminded him that such actions could negatively skew experienced wikipedia authors and editors to develop a negative, stereotypical attitude towards Ukraine and Ukrainians. Considering that the people who he brings from Maidan forum are a marginal group of people who do not represent the Ukrainian nation as a whole.

[edit] Comments to the statement by party 6
Could the Ukrainian nation be left alone at least? The article Holodomor has been edited by you with multiple violations of the rules of Wikipedia. You have engaged in revert wars, doctoring and erasing quotes from reputable sources on multiple occasions. Profound rudeness is to accuse editors of "laziness" while slashing and destroying valuable references.--Andrew Alexander 05:12, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
Sources whose factual information has been DISPROVED. Respectible that the same source made very many public mistakes. And why should I leave a coutry alone where I lived for five years and have many friends there, go there often, and my wife happens to come from there. I do accuse him of laziness because I am yet to see a respecitble piece of work submitted by him.Kuban kazak 14:44, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Statement by party 7 (User:Sashazlv)

As a native Ukrainian speaker, I had a chance to closely follow User:AndriyK's remarks about Wikipedia users and articles that he posted on maidanua forum. Some of the remarks were also cross-posted on pravda.com.ua forum, one of the most popular fora among the Ukrainian Internet community.

Overall, I found his remarks humiliating, at best. For instance, in describing his "rivals", User:AndriyK used such derogatory expressions as "Russian mafia", "teenage gang", "cunning troll", "insufficiently educated", etc. At worst, the intention was to disrupt the regular process of expansion and improvement of Ukraine-related articles. The pool of Wikipedia users who can effectively contribute to such articles is tiny and this provocation has diverted effort and immensely drained scarce time.

I tried to reason with User:AndriyK and analyzed some of his comments ([22]). My primary conclusion was that his comments were not justified. Part of the reply I got from User:AndriyK was on the verge of personal offence. From that point on I deliberately abstained from direct confrontation.

Hopefully, the Arbitration Committee will find a way to insulate conscientious users from the disgraceful attack. Sashazlv 02:53, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Statement by party 8 (User:Alex Bakharev)

I find that User:AndriyK has a quite annoying habit of working for Wikipedia not by adding new articles or new information to the existing articles but by blanking information, changing the names of the geographical locations according to his POV and most importantly by initiating the revert wars.

Let us look for a few examples:

[edit] Ivan Kotlyarevsky

The history starts with AndreyK's friend User:Andrew Alexander put a blatant copyvio from the site http://wumag.kiev.ua , without any acknowledgements of somebody else's authorship. I had to put a copyvio notice on the article. I also asked for somebody to help Andrew Alexander on the Ukrainian notice board Portal:Ukraine/New article announcements#October 2005. Irpen wrote a stub and was willing to continue to work on the article. Meanwhile, Irpen, I and many other users were trying our best to explain the Wikipedia copyright requirements to Andrew Alexander (see Talk:Ivan Kotlyarevsky who kept reverting to copyvio version, then decided for some reason to plagiarize Brittanica instead of wumag.kiev.ua. Finally, Andrew and his seemed to stop interfere with the article. It was probably a good time to start to work on the article, then come User:AndriyK and restored the copyvio version again [23]. The article was protected and everybody seems to lost interest to improvement of the article. If the same effort that was put into the talk page and the revert war had been put into the article it will be a good article. Thus, the article about the man who considered to be the pioneer of Ukrainian literature is a stub, mostly due to the destructive actions of User:AndriyK and his friend.

"Unbiased" User:Alex Bakharev "forgot" to mention that User:Andrew Alexander mentioned to have performed a negotiation with the author of the article to pulblish it in Wikipedia.--Andrew Alexander 09:25, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
Well, the arbitrage is not about your behavior but about AndriyK's. Since I had limitation on the length of my statement I was trying not to dwell on your behavior (unless you suggest, that you and AndriyK are sockpupets of each other). I can believe that your first plagiarizing was an honest mistake (You sincerely thought that you can submit any text on a free web site as your own. Communists taught their school boys that plagiarizing is a small sin, etc.). I can believe the first of your reverts was an honest mistake. I have doubts that plagiarizing Britannica was an honest mistake. As for the other five reverts of you, one of your sockpupet and one of AndriyK, they were malicious actions with a single purpose to stop productive work on the article. Since we are discussing AndreyK now; I am more interested with the AndiyK's revert. BTW I am not a judge, I am a plaintiff here, I do not have to be unbiased. abakharev 10:59, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
I suggest you abstain from personal insults. First of all, I am not a "sockpuppet" of anyone nor do I have such. Second, I did not "plagiarize" anything (see Plagiarism) but published the original with the name of the author in it, with her explicit consent. Again, you misrepresent the events even though you can simply read the discussion for that article. But now you add insults to misrepresentations.--Andrew Alexander 22:32, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] St Volodymyr's Cathedral

This is an article about a pearl of Kievan barocco architecture. Lets look into the history of the article [24] . The article was started on June 7, 2005 by User:Ghirlandajo. It robustly grew by the efforts of User:Irpen, User:Mzajac, User:Kuban kazak and others. Everybody was adding new important information. Then on October 23, 2005 came User:AndriyK, who started by blanking info added by other users. The revert war continues to the present time (600 something edits) - many potentially productive people were involved. The article is almost in the same shape as it was on the tenth edit.

BTW, looking throw all these 600 edits, trying to find a positive contribution by AndriyK, I have found only a copyvio so far [25]. Together with his pushing for Copyvios in Ivan Kotlyarevsky articles it shows a kind of a sinister pattern, but lets hope it is just a coincidence.

[edit] Silly Chernihiv/Chernigov war

A Ukraine city usually has two English names: the older one, based on Russian (or old Slavonic) spelling and the newer one based on the modern Ukraine spelling. Usually the older names are still has wider usage in English (as supported by Googling), but wikipedia promotes the newer name for the modern events and the older ones for the history (especially for historical event that happen before the introducing of the modern Ukraine spelling). On October 23d User:AndriyK without consulting community changed the names of Chernigov (that happens to be the older name of the city) to Chernihiv in sixty-something articles. He wrote none of these article in almost all of them the name change was his only contribution. In all of these articles Chernigov name was used for the historical events, strictly according to the convention. He did not stopped with this WP:Point action - he started a revert war that continues up to the present time, having about 500 reverts for each of the "edited" articles. Assuming for a moment that there is a merit in using anachronistic names, Wikipedia has a policy of keeping all the ambiguous things consistent with the original author.

[edit] Resume

This only a part of the pattern of destructive behavior demonstrated by User:AndriyK, but I do not have more space in the 500 words limit. I am not aware of any new articles contributed by the user and only of a very few positive contributions by him. Currently his behavior significantly decreases quality of the Ukrainian segment of Wikipedia. Productive people avoid contributing articles on Ukrainian themes, AndriyK and his friends do not contribute much either spending most of their time on the revert wars. I think AndriyK should be banned from editing by reverting, blanking and changing names. Instead he should be encouraged to write new article and contribute new information to the present articles. abakharev 08:52, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Statement by party 9 (User:Mzajac)

AndriyK has come to English-language Wikipedia with a political agenda, and expends great energy in pursuing it. Based on his own statements here and at the Maidan forums, I think that he feels that en.wikipedia is saturated with the "Russian mafia's" point of view, and he intends to fix this, mostly by the mass changing of names from Russian to Ukrainian versions. He sees this as an us-against-them war. He'll do it wherever he thinks he can get away with it, by any means possible, and whether it's appropriate or not. He shows little respect for the collaborative spirit of Wikipedia or for other editors' feelings. His actions have wasted an enormous amount of energy and productivity, inflamed the community of editors of Ukrainian-related articles, and brought out the worst in many others including AndriyK's "foes" and "allies", to the point of being very destructive.

I honestly wish he'd pitch in and apply his copious energy otherwise. He's counselled others that neutral point of view can be restored to many articles by adding balancing encyclopedic material, but sadly, he's applied himself this way in a very few cases. —Michael Z. 2005-11-23 22:30 Z

[edit] Statement by party 10 (User:Introvert)

My biggest concern about User:AndriyK is that his activity is highly disruptive, and he has resorted to falsification of facts and misuse of information trying to force his point. Not to repeat the others' examples, I will bring just a few more below.

1) AndriyK's editing Kievan Rus', the article which has been in the working since 19 March 2002 [26], and was included into the series of History articles and the appropriate template added to it since July 2003 [27].

AndriyK removed the series template from the article without making any attempt to discuss the matters (talk:Kievan Rus', [28]: no statement from User:AndriyK to be found). For this major removal, he supplied the following edit summary: [29] ("Correcting spellings").

2) AndriyK's renaming of the articles about two Rus' princes, Oleg of Chernigov, Mikhail of Chernigov, and the subsequent moves vote, which not only is a sad example of his bad-faith moving technique, but also a fraudulent voting campaign brought by him to help him force in his point.

I see two major issues about AndriyK's way of handling those moves votes: 1) forcing his point of view by bringing in voters who were in fact voting on the wrong subject, did not seem to understand the main point of the argument nor to care about it, thus effectively, rendering vote a fraud; 2) repeatedly trying to back his position by referring to discussions which in fact, had rendered the opposite result from what he was claiming.

Many editors including myself [30] have tried to remind AndriyK that the name of the modern city is not to be confused with the conventional English name for the person (Talk:Mikhail of Chernihiv, Talk:Oleg of Chernihiv: references and occurrence counts provided). As agreed, in cases where naming variations exist, the names for people, events and places in historical context should be kept the way they were written back in the time.

Here is a discussion [31] which undoubtedly substantiated which historical naming should be used in English. User:AndriyK was not able to disprove those arguments in any valid manner. However, trying to back up his position in the subsequent voting discussions, he kept claiming the opposite as if he had indeed had any proof [32], [33] stating, "credible sources apply modern name to all periods of history".

I am concerned that the articles on medieval history, where one needs to be extra careful about every bit of information, may have sustained particularly heavy damage from this user's actions. Efforts of multiple editors, their productive work has been practically stalled since this edit warring had started back in October. Everybody is on red alert and barely trying to keep established versions of the articles, saving important bits of information lost amid the storm of reversals.

User AndriyK has made rude remarks on the Maidan forum about the most respectful editors, and allowed slandering comments to editors en masse ("Russian mafia"). When other editors tried repeatedly to find common ground or a compromise with this user, he took a staunch position of a self-righteous crusader and would not yield an inch, only pretending to negotiate. He has demonstrated inflexibility, which together with his hypocritical manner of holding discussion, his forceful behavior and cheat, made it so hard to deal with and became an uttermost disruption to normal work.

[edit] Statement by party 11 (User:Fisenko)

(Please limit your statement to 500 words)

AndriyK has moved to "more Ukrainian" names a number of articles created by me such as Ivan Bogun, Severyn Nalyvaiko and Putivl as well as edited numerous other articles without any discussions and explanations. He labels everyone who disagree with him as "Russian mafia" and is trying to use Wikipedia for his own political agenda. Fisenko 03:58, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Statement by party 12 (User:KNewman)

What worries me the most is not AndriyK's name change drive or attempts to adhere to "facts" per se (which are as old as Wikipedia itself), but his very manner of doing this without even trying to reach consensus with the rest of the wiki-community. If I remember it right, we first met on the Talk page of the Russkaya Pravda article. Right after I posted my comment, AndriyK labeled us all a "teenager gang" and "lynching mob" for simply trying to reason with him. My ensuing encounters with AndriyK made me think that he was on some name-changing rampage (e.g., see histories of Drevlyans, Vyatichs, Severians, Motorins). The issue of Chernigov/Chernihiv has been a major disappointment for everybody, as we already know from other comments. If you ask me, AndriyK should be somehow restrained because of the counterproductive and, at times, disruptive nature of his edits, but this I leave to the Arbitration Committee.

[edit] Statement by party (User:AndriyK)

Below are my comments to the accusations reised against me.

  1. "Bad faith moves" and transliteration
    Most of moves I made were related to mere spelling corrections.
    • Names of persons. Imagine that not a native English speaker X wrote an article about some English or American person, say George Washington, but misspelled the title as, for instance, George Vashington. Native English speaker Y corrected it by moving the page to George Washington. Would the behavior of user Y be considered as "POV pushing", "disruptive behavior". Would user X, if acting in good faith, have any objections against the move made by user Y? Would he start a "move war" against user Y ? In normal situation it would be normal cooperation of wikipedians.
      Unfortunatelly the present situation in East Slavic sector of en-Wikipedia is not normal. A groop of users for some unknown reasons try to thrust Russian transliteration for Ukrainian names.
      Usually names of persons are spelled exactly as in the language of the nation/ethnos they belong to. If the language uses an alphabet different from the Latin one, then transliteration is needed. The transliteration table from Ukrainian is available. I corrected several names (e.g. Ivan Bohun, Severyn Nalyvaiko etc.) according to Ukrainian spelling and the transliteration table. Is there any reason to consider these moves "controvercial" or "made in bad faith"? What is the reason to revert them?
    • Geographic locations. Some geographic entities in Ukraine have been well known outside the country for a long time. Some of them have well established English spellings different from direct transliteration from Ukrainian. I respect traditions of English language. Therefore, I did not correct "Dnieper" to "Dnipro", "Crimea" to "Krym", or "Galicia" to "Halychyna", "Dniester" to "Dnister" etc. I did not even correct "Kiev" to "Kyiv", because I see that the spelling "Kiev" is still more familiar to English speaking readers. This spelling is also used in Encyclopedia Britannica in the corresponding article.
      But there are smaller locations like, for instance, Kiev subway stations. Are they so famous that English language readers get used to some particular spelling? Why transliteration from Russian should be preffered over Ukrainian transliteration for subway stations in the capital of Ukraine? Why the fact that I corrected the article titles is considered as "distructive behaviour"?
      There is a small river Stuhna a dozen or so kilometers from Kiev. The river is so small that probably even not all people in Ukraine know this name. How English-language readers could get used to the spelling Stugna? Is the Battle of the Stuhna River so famouse that English language readers got used to the Russian-styled name "Battle of the Stugna River"?
      Ukrainian city Chernihiv is indeed known both as Chernihiv and Chernigov. But there is no reason to consider Chernigov as established English spelling. All English language encyclopedias (Encyclopedia Britannica, Encarta, Columbia Encyclopedia) use the spelling Chernihiv in their articles about the city. There is also no reason to consider the name Chernigov more "historical" as Chernihiv. In fact, English language sources apply the name Chernihiv to all periods of history: [34],[35], [36], [37], [38], [39], [40]. The East Slavic people in this area did not have the consonant "g" in their dialect. So transliteration containing "g" is deffinitely wrong. It reflects the Russian prononciation, which is irrelevant to Ukrainian cities. Still, the group of users tries to thrust Russian styled name of the sity into WP articles.
    I would like to bring your attention to the fact that correct name spelling prevents confusions. Here are two recent examples:
    • There are to different towns Halych in Ukraine and Galich in Russia. Some articles had reference to the corresponding disambiguation page Galich. Because links to disambiguation page are discauraged, I corrected the several articles, for instance this on[41] (along with changing the spelling of Chernihiv). User Irpen reverted it back to the wrong link a minute later [42]. I pointed it out at the Irpen's talk page: [43]. But it did not help. He continued the revert war [44] and other users that made the above statesments against supported him[45],[46], [47]. (More details are given here)
    • There are two different rivers thousand or more kilometers apart: Trubizh River in Ukraine and Trubezh River in Russia. The article about Trubizh had title "Trubezh" therefore articles about towns at different rivers had reference to the same article. I corrected this mistake by moving Trubezh -> Trubizh, creating a stub Trubezh River, and correcting the referens in the article Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi[48]. User Irpen reverted my changes [49]. I pointed it out at Irpen's talk: [50] but he did not react and continued the revert waron other pages. I wrote one more message: [51], but no reaction followed.
  2. "Rewert wars"
    Any change to the articles about Ukraine if they do not correspond the tastes of the ceratin group of people is labeled as nationalism and results in an edit war. User:Ghirlandajo made it very clear on my talk page:
    If your aim here is to engage in endless and ultimately fruitless edit wars and reverts, you'll get plenty of it, until your childish attitude towards editing is changed. [52]
    Therefore, "Do not engage in edit wars" means practically "Do not edit articles". As far as I started edit, the group of users that made statements against me (not actually all but most of them) started edit wars against me.
    I indeed reverted some articles "on daily basis", but this was because a group of users reverted my edits restoring wrong links, wrong spellings of Ukrainian names, as well as propaganda insertions. I ask the Arbitration Commity to treat both sides equelly which is hardly possible within the case entitled "Community agains AndriyK". Please pay attention to the fact that I corrected obvious mistakes in the articles, while my opponents restored them again and again.
    My opponents did not accept any compromise. When User:Piotrus was trying to mediate the dispute and proposed a temporal solution [53]. I immediatelly accepted it and informed the most active participants of the edit war[54], [55]. They, however, did not accepted this temportal compromise and continued the edit war [56],[57]. Similarly they did not accept any compromise on St Volodymyr's Cathedral.
    • St Volodymyr's Cathedral:
      The edit war on this article was started by user Kuban kazak who inserted an extremly Russian Orthodox POV paragraph. I did my best to stop the edit war on the article. The details are presented here.
  3. "Sockpuppets"
    I have only one account at en-wikipedia: AndriyK.
    None of the people in the list compiled by User:Ezhiki I know in person. I met before some of this people at uk-wikipedia. Some can be associated with the nicks I've seen at Internet forums. Some nicks I saw for the first time at the voting page.
    I support the request to check the voters on vote pages by technical means to exclude or confirm the allegation of User:Ezhiki.
    I would ask Arbitration Commity to treat both parties equely: both group of users should be checked whether they are or are not sockpuppets. User:Ezhiki listed allerged sockpuppets from one side, has "forgoten" to make simlar list of the party he supports. See, for instance, contributions of User:Greka [58].
  4. "Copyright violation"
    User Andrew Alexander was clearly acting in good faith. The text he coppied into the article about Ivan Kotlyarevsky was permitted to be freely distributed. He did not understand, however, the subtle difference between free distribution in general and free distribution in terms of GFDL. I also had no idea of these subtleties that time. So I restored his version. Then I got a message from an admin about copyright violation and did not perform any further action on the article. So I reverted the article only one time being not aware about some subtelties of copyright matters. Is my guilt so serious that it deserves to be considered by arbitration commity?
    My contribution to St Volodymyr's Cathedral (a small paragraph) [59] is not a precise copy from the source. Is there any rules how two texts have to be similar to be considered as copyright violation? I am still not aware of it. If these rules exist, it would be nice to inform all new users about them to avoid such mistakes in future.
  5. My annoncement at maidan.org.ua and "Vote falsification"
    When I saw that many WP articles about Ukraine are biased and incomplete I decided to bring attention of the Ukrainian internet community to Wikipedia and invite more people to contribute to it. This was the purpose of my annoncement on maidan.org.ua.
    What User:Ezhiki calles "English translations of the posts ... here and here"' is, in fact, not a translation of my posts but rather the opinion of some of my opponents about my posts. Unfortunatelly, English translation of all my posts is not available. Only one message was translated into English and was published on the English version of the site Maidan. Please find the translation here.
    When I invited people to express their opinion about renamind Oleg of Chernihiv and Mikhail of Chernihiv, I did not have any intention to falsify the vote. I thought that Wikipedia community may be interested to know the opinion of broader circle of people than the group of users pushing Russian POV.
    I did not find in WP policies any prohibition to invite editors from outside forums. In my opinion, larger number of editors and broader diversity of opinions will improve the quality of the resours.
    I am sorry, if my activity damaged Wikipedia in any way.

(To be continued)

[edit] Statement by party (User:Ashapochka)

Well, eleven against one, using phraseology like “sock puppets and blind followers” on every single Wikipedian who happens to support AndriyK’s standpoint, is not easy to stomach. Luckily this same fact hints us some of the dear community-members-speaking-against-AndriyK might just be in for suppression and ostracism of this Wikipedian, who has different (and nevertheless well founded on facts) views on the Ukraine-related encyclopedic knowledge from theirs, rather than on the quest for the truth and understanding. For example User:Ezhiki calls me a “possible sock puppet of AndriyK”. He never contacted me to see if that was the case, he could verify that my Wikipedia account is old enough to make such a statement sound silly, he could check it out I am an active contributor to the Ukrainian Wikipedia and some of my articles were chosen “Articles of the week” out there. But he preferred not to check his facts for some reason and go right for the offence. I would not be surprised if some of the other so called “sock puppets” turned to be normal, responsible for their votes wikipedians. For his information I had never been contacted by AndriyK before I came and expressed my mind (based on facts) on the matter of Ukrainian-Latin transliteration here and explicitly pointed to it from my “Chernihiv” votes.

They further argue, AndriyK goes for support to the Ukrainian Wikipedia and Maidan. Ok, tell me please where else can you expect to find an authoritative opinion on the Ukrainian language and transliteration of the Ukrainian names if not among English speaking Ukrainian wikipedians? Let us note the fact, he cannot make wikipedians vote to his benefit, they are always free to express their opinions.

I do not believe the arbitration arguments against him based on his renaming activities hold any water. The official guide to transliteration can be seen here, and while it is true not everyone in the world sticks to it, you must produce some really hard stats numbers to prove it must not be used in the Wikipedia despite the fact it is official in Ukraine and as such is used by the country’s Government, commercial companies, educational institutions, etc. See also the Lviv University lections on translation theory and practice for the future diplomats [60] (in Ukrainian). As for the historical tradition, the Russian variants of Ukrainian names are without doubt preferred by Russian speaking people. But does one attempt to transliterate Polish or Finnish (former parts of the Russian Empire) names from their Russian spellings? And even those speaking against AndriyK readily recognize that as a rule he made a provision for the folks comfortable with the Russian-style transliteration only creating the corresponding automatic redirects.

I am approaching my word limit for the comment, but I hope the outmost weakness of the arguments against AndriyK was shown clearly even in these 500 words (against the total of several thousands by his opponents) --ashapochka 14:25, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

I do admit the possibility of me misidentifying a few of the accounts I listed as sockpuppets. Yours, for example, was included not because it falls under the technical definition of a sockpuppet, but rather under the extended definition ("these newly created accounts... may be friends of a Wikipedian, or may be related in some way to the subject of an article under discussion. These accounts are not actually sockpuppets, but they are difficult to distinguish from real sockpuppets and are treated similarly"). Still, I am ready to publicly apologize (once this RfAr is over), if that will make you feel better.
I do not feel I am in a position to comment on the rest of your statement. I'm sure ArbComm will take it into account when making a decision.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 15:54, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
Ezhiki, I gladly accept your apologies, thank you. Oh, well, RfAr isn't over yet, but nevertheless, I should know about myself even now whether I am a sock puppet or not :))).

[edit] Comment of statement by party (User:Ashapochka)

Mr. Ashapochka, please stop misinforming others. Four plaintiffs - Irpen, Michael Z., Sashazlv, Fisenko - are ethnic Ukrainians. Halibutt is a very respected Polish editor, whose reputation for occasional nationalism nearly cost him adminship. We represent the community who actually *edits* East Slavic topics, not just blindly changes spelling of one or two names, and then reverts endlessly, like you do.

The proper name for the city of Chernigov should be discussed on Talk:Chernihiv. Andriy has been told quite a few times that the historical name Chernigov should be reserved for historical purposes. He is free to use a modern Ukrainian spelling, Chernihiv, when referring to modern politics and post-1917 Ukraine. For earlier periods, the name Chernigov should be preferred, as they do in the 2004 Britannica and as proposed by user:Mikkalai.

The modern Ukrainian form Chernihiv evolved from the Old East Slavic form Chernigov in the late Middle Ages, when the common Slavic vowel o (cf. Lwow, Krakow, Kijow, Pskov) was transformed in Ukrainian to i (cf. Lviv, Krakiv, Kyiv). It is also worth noting that the names promoted by Andriy - Oleg of Chernihiv, Mikhail of Chernihiv - are incorrect both in Russian and Ukrainian. The correct Ukrainian versions would be Oleh of Chernihiv and Mikhailo of Chernihiv. Therefore, AndriyK's preferred names should be classified as original research, and quite misleading at that. He has been told that before but refuses to discuss the matter in any meaningful way. Escalating revert wars is so much easier.

Also, the google search reveals that the spelling Chernigov is three times more popular in English than Chernihiv. Consequently, total elimination of the well-established historic name from the article is unacceptable. I don't know why you, AndriyK and your friends refuse to discuss the matter and prefer to enforce your POV by rigging move votes. Please stop complaining and do something positive. --Ghirlandajo 10:04, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

Oh, come on, Mr Ghirlandajo, even making your comment about me misinforming the Arbitration commity, you choose to neglect the truth, which is I never moved a single article in the en:Wikipedia, and I never changed spelling of proper names in it. Anyone can check it for herself. In lying there is no honor and no profit, Mr. Ghirlandajo, for it undermines peoples' trust in your other assertions be they true or not.

[edit] Comment to comment by Ghirlandajo

First, ethnicity is irrelevant to the point. Second, one cannot check the athnicity of the user.

Please do not misinform the Arbitration commity. Chernihiv is used in the 2004 Britannica everywhere in the article and applied to all periods of the history, while Chernigov is just mentioned as the Russian name of the city [61]. You have provided no references confirming that Chernigov is more "historical" the Chernihiv.

It is open question when exactly the common Slavonic "o" evolved into Ukrainian "i". But even if one assumes it happened in "late Middle Ages", then at earlier times the name was prononce as "Chernihov". The East Slavic tribes that populated the territory of present-day Ukraine did not have consonant "g" in their dialects. (See book by Shevelov cited in Ukrainian Language).

The most blatant lie is that we allegigly refuse to discuss the matter. It's enough to have a look at Talk:Chernihiv# Chernihiv vs. Chernigov and Portal talk:Ukraine/New article announcements how much time I spent explaining you the basic things, but you showed you inability to accept any arguments.--AndriyK 16:38, 25 November 2005 (UTC)

Andriy, don't start this again. Isn't it ridiculous to back up statements on impropriety of the spelling Chernigov with an url which features this word: http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9023842?query=Chernigov&ct= check. And of course Ukrainian "h" is also a secondary development which replaced PIE and Common Slavic "g" in later centuries. Anyway, you found a wrong place for discussions of this sort. Go to Talk:Chernihiv and discuss the issue there. --Ghirlandajo 18:23, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
I discussed enough at Talk:Chernihiv. Now I just try to demonstrate to the Arbitration Commity that Ghirlandajo is cheating and twist the facts making his statement against me. This is the right place to do it.
I provided a reference (book by Shevelev) stating that the consonant "g" was not present in the dialects of Easten Slavs that lived on the territory of present-day Ukraine. Ghirlandajo asserts the opposite without any reference. This demostrate the discussion style of my opponents. This is also relevant to the case under consideration.--AndriyK 01:05, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Statement by party (User:Andrew Alexander)

I'd like to direct your attention to my comments made above regarding User:Ezhiki's personal attacks, User:Irpen's personal attacks and violations of Wikipedia rules when e.g. deleting references, User:Ghirlandajo's personal attacks and out-of-control revert warring, User:Kuban kazak's wanton doctoring and deletion of reputable sources, User:Alex Bakharev's avoiding truthful depiction of the events. It also must be noted that all the mentioned users, without exception, appear to be native in the Russian language. While this is great when people from different countries can come to Wikipedia, it's not OK when people from one country gang up against a person from another nation to suppress his or her political views. If you read the original complaints, practically all of them have something to do with Ukrainian related articles. I hate to make this conclusion, but it seems almost as if the mentioned people decided to police and revert these article in favor of the Russian nationalism POV. The arbitrary deletions and source doctoring in the Holodomor article strike particularly by its cynicism. To come here after that reference massacre and demand "justice" seems flat obscene.--Andrew Alexander 21:21, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

Again, links to diffs would be helpful. I am especially interested to see my personal attacks revealed.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 02:27, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
Read here: [62]--Andrew Alexander 05:44, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
While I already mentioned that filing an RfAr case is not a personal attack, but a procedure everyone is entitled to, I'll leave this with no comment. The final decision is ArbComm's anyway.—Ëzhiki (erinaceus amurensis) 15:43, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
Quote:it's not OK when people from one country gang up against a person from another nation to suppress his or her political views.
Wikipedia is an apolitical encyclopedia, I suggest that you understand this as well. I know that I might write an article which is biased, but I encourage people to neutralise it, and provide more sources. AndriyK seems to follow the opposite policy of giving refernces to nationalistic sources and politising the articles, as do you Andrew - Due to the Soviet and Modern Russian policy of covering up. In Holodomor I believe that was your quote. In fact AndriyK has numerously said that he will ensure that Wikipedia is cleansed of KGB/FSB propaganda. Kuban kazak 14:54, 26 November 2005 (UTC)
Kuban kazak, perhaps it's just your style of doctoring quotes, but I never wrote the second quote as you posted it here.--Andrew Alexander 00:21, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Regarding Irpen's denials of own edit summaries with deletions of quotes and references. It illustrates the integrity of the accusations Irpen brings forward. It also illustrates the character of revert warfare conducted by the accusers.--Andrew Alexander 05:50, 26 November 2005 (UTC)


For the record. Your edit [63] of Ivan Kotlyarevsky is a blatant copying and pasting 678 words from somebody else's work [64] (almost entire content of the webpage) and 50 words of [65]. You did not do any attempt to acknowledge the authorship of the texts until caught red-handed [66], nor did you bother to at least copy-edit the text to prevent legal problems for Wikipedia. Copy-pasting large chunks of information without acknowledgements the sources is called Plagiarism. It is an indisputable fact. My hypothesis that your behavior might be an honest mistake caused by the lenience of the Soviet system of education to plagiarism is my opinion, it is not supported by facts. I am sorry if it offended you. Quite possible you acted in bad faith from the very beginning.
You are certainly entitled to your opinions, however, as an administrator of Wikipedia, you should not try to hide the facts and mislead the Arbitration Committee. The fact of the matter is that I tried to contact the author and received her permission to publish the article, which was indicated on the article's discussion page.--Andrew Alexander 23:05, 26 November 2005 (UTC)
The addition [67] by AndriyK is also a direct copy-paste of a paragraph of approximately 65 words from the [68]. It is definitely a blatant copyvio, but might not be a plagiarism, since the source was already put to the External links section of the article by some other editor. After the paragraph was re-written in the non-copyvio form by User:Andrew Alexander it was accepted by all the parties (BTW it was me, who was trying to protect the paragraph by User:AndriyK, User:Andrew Alexander and Andriy VLASENKO, Viktor KYRKEVYCH and Serhiy KARDASH from [69] from the accusation in POV. See Talk:St Volodymyr's Cathedral#Recent Edit war). abakharev 22:05, 26 November 2005 (UTC).

It must be noted that St Volodymyr's Cathedral has been reverted at least 150 times to underline the "uncanonical" status of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Kiev Patriarchy (as opposed to Moscow Patriarchy) and to switch Ukrainian name tranliterations into Russian ones: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=St_Volodymyr%27s_Cathedral&action=history. The article is curently undergoing RfM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Improv#RFM. The RfM has been requested by AndriyK, which seems to have acted the most mature in that conflict.--Andrew Alexander 07:16, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

This below was interjecting into the statement made by another user. Moved to the author's section. --Irpen 21:15, 9 December 2005 (UTC)

Introvert, the box was removed just 1 revert away from the edit by AndriyK here: [70], with the comment: "Removed "History_of_Russia_Ukraine_Belarus" box of links since it mostly contains history of Russia, making it biased." AndriyK simply restored that version. While he did not add any significant comment for this, this doesn't seem the reason to list it as "evidence". People forget adding comments all the time on that page. Here, for instance, User:Ghirlandajo sticks the Russian history box back in with no comment at all: [71]. Then User:Irpen puts the box back in yet once again: [72], with a disruptive comment "rv vandalism".--Andrew Alexander 05:25, 28 November 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Statement by User:Lysy

While I'm not directly involved in the edit war between Russian and Ukrainian editors on Ukraine-related articles, I've been following it closely and I tend to believe that the problem there is not going to be solved by punishing individual editor but rather calls for some sort of protection of the relevant articles. By protection I do not mean "lock" but rather some more strict limitation of number of reverts of these articles, like to one revert per 24h or other means that would incline the warring parties to discuss more instead of stubbornly forcing one version over another. This said I've the impression that User:AndriyK is often more eager to compromise than some of his Russian speaking opponents. --Lysy (talk) 17:55, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

I would like to second this statement by Lysy. In this particular orbitration case a ban or another form of punishment applied to AndriyK or any of the other parties will definitely not be viewed as just and deserved by quite a few of those involved in the dispute. Finding a sound and just compromise with help of the Arbitration Committee should serve to achieve the peace much-much better. --ashapochka 19:59, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

Frankly, I doubt if finding a compromise is within Arbcoms scope of action. I'd rather hope for some enforcement that would strongly suggest to everyone involved in these editwars that discussion is a better and preferred way of handling it. But above all, I think that RFC would be more appropriate than RFAr here. --Lysy (talk) 20:20, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

I support Lysy's proposal as well. Buchik 20:54, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Statement by User:Gutsul

Dear wikipedians, all of you should understand what is going on. Some editors like AndriyK and others are trying to change names of cities, historical facts and so on to more common in Ukraine. It’s not a secret that in the whole world USSR was seen as Russia and Ukraine was seen only as part of this Russia. Terminology used for Ukraine was translated from Russian. Now Ukraine is independent country and we are trying to change this russified point of view on Ukraine and its history. I don’t expect that it will be easy. We are only at the beginning of our long way, but I do believe that in 10-20 years will not be discussed how to call Ukrainian cities in English (Чернігів will be Chernihiv).

So what AndriyK is doing is very important and i will try to support him. Maybe sometimes the way he doing it is not the best way so such cases one should discuss. Gutsul 09:12, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Your goals are understandable, but wikipedia cannot be a vehiche for doing so. Please learn the basic rules here in wikipedia and come back in "10-20" years. Meanwhile there is a huge amount of information to be contributed about Ukraine. mikka (t) 05:52, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
But it can be used to spread russain myths. Strange, very strange... --Gutsul 07:55, 28 November 2005 (UTC)
Please feel free to word out any "Russian myth" (considering that mere new spellings in a foreign language to ukrainian can certainly not be called a "russian myth") you seebeing spread by Wikipedia. Circeus 22:50, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Statement by Yakudza

The request for arbitration looks as well-prepared attack. The group of users who submitted the request had prepared it in advance and coordinated their action to create illusion of "unanimity" of Wikipedia editors. Most of the accusations are juggled and unfair.

  • Concerning this silly renaming war

Chernigov<->Chernihiv, I believe that every war has two sides. These was AndriyK on one side and User:Irpen and User:Ghirlandajo were on the other side. Participation of other users was not significant. Irpen and Girlandajo as more experienced users acted jointly and did not let to caught them at 3RR violation.

In my opinion, AndriyK should not continue this silly war, but his action was provoked by Irpen and Girlandajo. In spite of his rather large number of edits, User:Ghirlandajo is very intolerant to opinions of other editors. He often offend them. Here are several examples of Girlandajo's comments to his edits:

  • (rvv attack by Polish Mafia :)))
  • (rvv a new attack by banderovtsy)
  • (rvv foolish ukrainization of russophone towns)
  • (rvv idiotic Moldovan nationalism)
  • (rvv a new piece of polish idiocy)
  • (stop pushing laughable nationalism, or you will be banned)
  • (rvv islamic propaganda)
  • (rvv a lunatic vandal)
  • (rv edits by another Polish zombie)
  • (rv moron who was blocked yesterday but returned)
  • (rv demented racist who was blocked yesterday but returned)
  • (rv shameless POV-pushing by a banderovets)
  • (rv a revert maniac)

He called me "banderovets" (a very insulting name given by Russian nationalists to Ukrainians). His edits contain a lot of POVs. User:Ghirlandajo makes a large number of reverts calling edits of other users "vandalism" and very rarely discuss the disagreement on talk pages.

User:Irpen, in contrast to User:Ghirlandajo, is rather polite and correct. But he rarely accept a compromise. He is a very hard and obstinate editor. User:Irpen made no useful contribution to Wikipedia articles during the last month. Almost the whole activity of User:Irpen was directed to personal conflict with User:AndriyK. In my opinion, he wanted to revenge himself upon AndriyK for calling him an organiser of "Russian Mafia".

Concerning the voting about renaming of the articles Mikhail of Chernihiv and Oleg of Chernihiv, I believe that AndriyK's call for help at Maidan.org is nothing blamable. After his announcement, a few new editors came to Wikipedia. Some of them did not restrict their activity to voting, but started to work in English and Ukrainian Wikipedia. Favouring of the growth of the community is a part of the Wikipedia policy. The larger is the community the higher is the quality of the articles.

I have to stress, that the level of articles about Ukraine is rather low, mostly because of the little number of editors. When new users come, they run into the boorishness of User:Ghirlandajo and obstinacy of User:Irpen, see that any constructive work is impossible, and finally have to give up, or get engaged in edit wars like AndriyK. --Yakudza 19:34, 9 December 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Preliminary decisions

[edit] Arbitrators' opinions on hearing this matter (5/0/0/0)

[edit] Temporary injunction (none)

[edit] Final decision

All numbering based on /Proposed decision (vote counts and comments are there as well)

[edit] Principles

[edit] Consensus

1) Wikipedia:Consensus requires that decisions be made by a process of discussion, negotiation and compromise. When there is no existing policy one may be crafted using the procedures in Wikipedia:How to create policy.

Passed 7-0, 04:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Civility

2) Wikipedia:Civility requires courtesy towards other users and the assumption of good faith Wikipedia:Assume good faith

Passed 7-0, 04:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Disruptive user may be banned

3) A user who disrupts the functioning of Wikipedia by insisting on taking action which violates consensus may be banned or their editing restricted.

Passed 7-0, 04:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Role of the Naming Conventions

4.2) The Wikipedia guidelines on naming conventions are guidelines which are developed and updated by community consensus. Editors will not be censured if they disregard (or are unaware of) naming conventions when creating new material. However, they must neither alter existing compliant material to make it noncompliant nor interfere when other editors change material to comply with the accepted conventions. Editors who do not agree with consensus naming conventions must discuss them within the community, not disrupt them.

Passed 7-0, 04:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Findings of fact

[edit] Locus of dispute

1) The locus of this dispute is AndriyK's crusade regarding use of transliteration of Ukrainian language names and places for historic persons and places and the tactics he has used.

Passed 7-0, 04:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Naming conventions

2) Wikipedia:Naming conventions#Ukrainian names provides that "For geographic names in Ukraine, the Ukrainian National system is used. For historic reasons, many names are also presented in Russian, Polish, etc.". The Naming Conventions currently do not address the question of names and persons associated with the Kievian Rus', the historical predecessor of Russia and Ukraine.

Passed 7-0, 04:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] AndriyK's crusade

3) AndriyK, taking an aggressive Ukrainian nationalist position, has strongly advocated use of the Ukrainian names for historical places and persons. Without obtaining consensus regarding policy, he has repeatedly inserted his preferred usage into a number of pages (links to evidence) and moved a number of pages, see Move log. Facing the obvious tactic of others moving back he devised a method of preventing reverts of his page moves by producing an artificial history for redirect pages, see [73]. For non-administrators reversing such a move involves placing a request at Wikipedia:Requested moves, see Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/AndriyK/Evidence#Move fraud.

Passed 7-0, 04:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] AndriyK's appeal to the Ukrainians and personal attacks

4) In order to obtain reinforcements AndriyK appealed to forums frequented by Ukrainians, negatively characterizing his opponents on Wikipedia. Those recruited were requested to take his side in disputed votes which some of them did, see Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/AndriyK/Workshop#.22The_falsified_voting.22 and Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/AndriyK/Workshop#Personal_attacks_on_outside_forum.

Passed 7-0, 04:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Copyright violations

5) Andrew Alexander, AndriyK, and MaryMaidan all disrupted removal of a copyright violation, Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/AndriyK/Evidence#Mass_disruptions_of_multiple_articles

Passed 7-0, 04:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Rudeness and personal attacks by Ghirlandajo

6) Ghirlandajo has sometimes been discourteous [74] [75], see Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/AndriyK/Evidence#Rude_comments_in_edit_summary

Passed 7-0, 04:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Remedies

Note: All remedies that refer to a period of time, for example to a ban of X months or a revert parole of Y months, are to run concurrently unless otherwise stated.

[edit] Restrictions on AndriyK's editing

1) Until by consensus he has agreed to a suitable and mutually agreed naming convention using the guideline Wikipedia:Naming conflict, AndriyK is prohibited from moving pages, or changing the content of articles which relate to Ukrainian names, especially those of historical interest.

Passed 7-0, 04:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] AndriyK banned

2) AndriyK is banned for one month from Wikipedia for creating irreversible page moves.

Passed 7-0, 04:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Andrew Alexander, AndriyK, and MaryMaidan warned about copyright violations

3) Andrew Alexander, AndriyK, and MaryMaidan are warned to avoid copyright violations and to cooperate with the efforts of others to remove copyright violations.

Passed 7-0, 04:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ghirlandajo warned

4) Ghirlandajo is warned to avoid incivility or personal attacks.

Passed 7-0, 04:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Reversal of irreversible page moves

5) Moved pages which have become irreversible by adding to the page history of the redirect page may be moved back without the necessity of a vote at Wikipedia:Requested moves.

Passed 7-0, 04:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Enforcement

[edit] Enforcement by block

1) Should AndriyK move any page or change the content of any article to conform with his preferred usage before an agreement is reached as to a naming convention concerning historical Russian names and places he may be briefly blocked, up to a week in the case of repeat offenses. After 5 blocks the maximum block shall be increased to one year.

Passed 7-0, 04:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Proof of agreement

2) AndriyK shall be considered to have arrived at a consensus regarding use of Ukrainian names for historic names and places when following Wikipedia:How to create policy he and the others concerned with this matter have come to an agreement and a link to the agreement placed at the foot of this page.

Passed 7-0, 04:19, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
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