Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Reddi

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Please do not edit this page directly if you are not a participant in this case. 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.

This is currently an unfinished draft...please refrain from editing.

[edit] Statement of complaint

I am requesting arbitration with request to the behavior pattern of User:Reddi (aka JDR) over the past year+ in editing science-related articles. Although he does not seem to be malicious, and is not generally abusive, he persistently engages in destructive behaviors that degrade Wikipedia and require extraordinary efforts to repair over and over again:

  • Nonsensical contributions to technical articles for subjects in which he (apparently) has little or no background. (He often appears to be attempting a summary of web sources, but due to apparent lack of basic comprehension, his summaries are often garbled.)
  • Giving misleading prominence to extreme fringe viewpoints (often, not published in mainstream peer-reviewed journals) in scientific articles, sometimes going so far as to present them as if they were accepted fact.
  • When the problems are pointed out in Talk, and articles are edited to a more mainstream perspective, with references, he fights tooth and nail to re-insert his problematic material and viewpoint. Objections to his pattern of edits have appeared repeatedly in Talk pages, to no avail.
  • After numerous people disagree with him in Talk, he usually stops, but often comes back weeks or months later and re-inserts similar or identical material in the same or other pages. (He also marks many such edits as "minor" when they are clearly not.)

My main concerns are with the second sort of edit; gibberish is easily spotted and mainly embarrassing, but misleading statements about historical experiments etcetera often require disproportionate effort to research and refute, and then more effort to fight with Reddi in editing. I give several examples under /Evidence. Please understand that I have no objection to inclusion of fringe scientific viewpoints, pseudo-science, and even sheer fantasy, as long as they are clearly presented as such, and are not given a prominence completely out of proportion with their acceptance in the scientific community.

I hesitate to enter upon this formal complaint, but Reddi's continual efforts to distort the scientific content in Wikipedia lead me to the conclusion that he is doing substantial, demonstrable harm that outweighs any good his other edits might do. (At least he is apparently an abberation; I don't know of any other user whose behavior comes even close.)

—Steven G. Johnson 00:56, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)