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Unlike many arbitrations, there was a *clear* pre-existing consensus for having presidential election results on county webpages. The Template:PresHead was created a little over 5 years ago and is used on (nearly) every county page in the United States (over 3000 pages). Given the scale of the proposed change to remove , I felt that editing only a single random county page to remove it with no discussion of the broader issue was inappropriate, so I initiated a discussion on the broader county project page, and seeing no dissenting opinions after several weeks, added it to the "content suggestions."

There is an offsite community informally called "Election Twitter" on X, formerly known as Twitter, that relies deeply on the presidential results being on Wikipedia county pages for discussion (evidence can be provided if necessary), of which only a handful of members are active editors who know how to engage the issue. According to Wikipedia rules, canvassing refers to " notification done with the intention of influencing the outcome of a discussion in a particular way." I did not *notify* anyone about the discussion as they were already aware of it, I merely directed several people to the talk page after they asked how to express their opposition, and also suggested that the edit warring stop and reverted to the clean versions prior to the beginning of the edit war.

(Whether the other editor who posted the initial thread on Twitter about the issue is problematic is another matter, but my role was clearly not a violation of canvassing). DemocraticLuntz (talk) 13:09, 9 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I am uninvolved in the dispute, and I don't know the facts in the dispute. However, I would like to address the possible remedy for off-wiki canvassing, if any. Here, protecting the article page and the talk page might be sufficient to deter the majority of new editors, as they hopefully would have forgotten after waiting four days. If this is adopted, the impact would be the formal addition of canvassing to WP:SEMI and WP:SEMIGUIDE. Sir Kenneth Kho (talk) 14:23, 17 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

While this may well result in further personal attacks and harassment, I think it's important to give some context as to what has been going on here. In the last year and a bit there have been several instances of editors posting on their social media accounts about issues they have with Wikipedia. This has led to canvassed comments on talkpages that have skewed and affected discussion outcomes, as well as driving edit warring – on two occasions largescale edit warring across dozens of articles. The problem appears to be increasing in frequency and reach. Although much of this has been done by relatively inexperienced editors, some long-term editors have happily been canvassed to discussions (and denied it is canvassing) or participated in the social media-drive edit warring.

Alongside this, there have been several cases of editors making personal attacks against other editors on social media, which if made on Wikipedia would have led to sanctions. In one recent case this included an editor shaming another who edits using their real name.

In terms of a brief chronology:

• A talkpage discussion in June 2023 was the first time I became aware of editors using social media to highlight disputes on Wikipedia. An editor posted screenshots of them being reverted alongside personal attacks and WP:OWN-type comments. This attracted a longtime editor to the talk page, who ended up being the only other substantial contributor to the debate (leading to the outcome going the way of the editor who had posted about it on social media). They admitted only commenting on the discussion after seeing the Twitter posts but denied being canvassed. The other editor declined to apologise for their personal attacks, saying what they did off-wiki was separate to their actions on-wiki. Neither of the editors in question are parties listed in this dispute so I have not identified them as I have zero desire to engage with either.
• A Twitter post in January 2024 (by someone who is not an editor to my knowledge) led to large-scale disruption on French election articles. The background to this is that in the first half of 2023 I had noticed that a large number of the article series contained made-up information or information which didn't match the sources, and went through them clearing out the misinformation. This came to to the attention of a Twitter account with a large following, who tweeted that I was "ruining" the articles. This triggered a large number of edits that blindly reverted the misinformation back into the articles. 1898 French legislative election was one of the worst affected (as it was the article featured in the tweets) and as can be seen from the edit history, several blind reverts were made to the article. The original Twitter post also promoted some other editors to start posting about disputes they had, leading to disruption on a small number of other articles. None of those editors are listed in this case. One editor was indeff'd (via ANI) after repeatedly reinstating the misinformation into dozens of articles, although they were subsequently unblocked. They are not party to this case.
• During the first half of 2024 I occasionally saw editors using their social media accounts to complain about disputes they were involved in, or editors who they were having disputes with. I noted this (and advised the editors in question that this was not appropriate), for example here or here). One is a party in this case, the other is not.
• In June 2024 an editor (one of the parties in this case) who was upset about changes to infoboxes on South African election articles tweeted about it, which started edit warring about infoboxes across over a hundred articles. Like the January incident, it included widespread blind reverting to French election articles that reintroduced incorrect information (see the edit history of 1958 French legislative election as an example). In some cases, the infobox changes had been decided by RfCs, which were ignored by the editors joining in the edit warring (e.g. seven days of edit warring on 2022 Italian general election). At the same time, several other editors started using their social media accounts to drive traffic to articles they wanted changed. This was sometimes accompanied by personal attacks.

The social media-driven editing also affected talkpage discussions, with the consensus of this discussion (which had led to the changes of South African infoboxes) changing after canvassed comments started coming in (which unfortunately was not acknowledged by the closer). Canvassed comments also resulted in the consensus in the aforementioned RfC on Italian articles being overturned.

• Later the same month another editor (one of the parties in this case) posted about a dispute they had become involved with (for clarity the editor who started that discussion is not the same person), together with some horrendous personal attacks and shaming of the editor they disagreed with. This canvassing was also being pushed by DemocraticLuntz who is not being entirely honest above and has deleted some of tweets they made that day.

The issue can be summed up neatly with a tweet by one of the parties to this case, which simply said "Fortunately, a great deal of [Election Twitter] users are also Wikipedia editors, so we do not have to take this lying down. We can march in there and change the damn consensus ourselves." Number 57 22:00, 20 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

before using the last evidence template, please make a copy for the next person

Place argument and diffs which support your assertion; for example, your first assertion might be "So-and-so engages in edit warring", which should be the title of this section. Here you would show specific edits to specific articles which show So-and-so engaging in edit warring.

Place argument and diffs which support the second assertion; for example, your second assertion might be "So-and-so makes personal attacks", which should be the title of this section. Here you would show specific edits where So-and-so made personal attacks.