A summary of the debate may be found at the bottom of the page.
In order to remain listed at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/User conduct, at least two people need to show that they tried to resolve a dispute with this user and have failed. This must involve the same dispute with a single user, not different disputes or multiple users. The persons complaining must provide evidence of their efforts, and each of them must certify it by signing this page with ~~~~. If this does not happen within 48 hours of the creation of this dispute page (which was: 14:05, 5 May 2008 (UTC)), the page will be deleted. The current date and time is: 20:53, 15 May 2024 (UTC).
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Yorkshirian contributes to Yorkshire and northern England related articles and the quality or content of his contributions is not disputed here. It is his conduct with other editors I ask for comment on. Yorkshirian has incredible difficulty working with others and the vast majority of his talk page contributions and edit summaries (where used) have been terse, rude or abusive. He does not accept the consensus of other editors and reverts multiple times, ignoring discussions that are ongoing, or only contributing to them once he is near to breaching 3RR.
(Provide diffs. Links to entire articles aren't helpful unless the editor created the entire article. Edit histories also aren't helpful as they change as new edits are performed.)
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The first phase of attempted dispute resolution involves myself and other editors approaching Yorkshirian on his talk page.
I approached Yorkshirian on three times to address my concerns:
Jza84 approached Yorkshirian about 3RR:
Harkey Lodger tried to draw Yorkshirian into using the talk pages of Yorkshire article instead of edit warring:
Jza84 initiated a Wikiquette alert:
My initial talk page comments on 13 January 2008 was rejected as a joke. [18]
Futher comments met with a statement that there was no desire to cause offense. [19] This I hoped would be the end of it.
However, further problems were summariesed in the Wikiquette alert filed by Jza84 on 3 May 2008. A third party reviewer found his behaviour to be at fault. Following this there has been no undertaking to improve his behaviour and rude edit summaries and talk page comments have followed:
Finally, he has explicitly rejected the comments at the Wikiquette alert, claiming the whole thing to be a "witch hunt":
As the Wikiquette alert wasn't getting anywhere I asked those involved if they felt things should move on to a third stage (RFC) and found Jza84 and Harkey Lodger to be agreement. So thats how we ended up here.
{Users who tried and failed to resolve the dispute}
This is a summary written by the user whose conduct is disputed, or by other users who think that the dispute is unjustified and that the above summary is biased or incomplete. Users signing other sections ("Statement of the dispute" and "Outside Views") should not edit the "Response" section.
I feel that MRSC has painted a largely unfair and uneven description of the situation. He and Jza have been just as much part and reason for this dispute as I have, one can't tango by ones self. To save time, I will repost a link reporting on MRSC unfortunately hostile conduct towards me that an admin suggested I do on WP:WQA.[25]
As I stated in the report itself, I felt the WP:WQA process was a failure, not throught lack of cooperation on my part, but because MRSC and Jza were completely unwilling to discuss or address anything of the content of my replies on the report.[39] Essentially that avenue failed because the two frustrated me, by refusing to discuss any of the issues I brought up at all while I offered the coutesy of replying to anything they brought up directly. I feel MRSC's claim that I have not engaged in talkpage discussion to be an embelishment of the truth, statistics show that I have engaged in discussion on the Yorkshire article alone 39 times.[40] Lets get this straight, this is born of a content dispute. The opinion of Jza and MRSC against my stance, and that others have voiced previously[41] (link shows a similar "tag team" effort in a content dispute) in regards to the historic counties.
And it should be noted that throughout my contributions, any claim I make is backed up fully by sources. For example in a dispute Jza and MRSC disagreed with me on in regards to government, I provided sources from Prince Charles and Minister of Local Government and Inner Cities Michael Portillo to back up what I was saying,[42] while they provided no direct quotes from senior politicians for their claim.[43] As Wikipedia:Verifiability is the core of what this website is built on, I would like an explination as to why this is being ignored in such article places? Verified statements surely defeats personal editor politicial opinion.
I admit that my red blooded way of talking can sometimes be mistaken as insulting, this is in all sincerity not my intention, it is just hard to "robotize" and "deflower" talk page words, though I will promise to try and keep my wording more "watered down". I feel that MRSC, a person directly in one side of this dispute setting out the guidlines on how I should to act is completely unbalanced. However, should MRSC and Jza too completely agree and comit to following "Desired outcome" as an act of good faith to show that they want to resolve this, then I too will be all too willing to do the same. An additional point I would like the two to comit to is, when discussing contentious issues to directly address any points brought up, rather than avoiding or ignoring them, as avoiding is not how disputes are resolved.[44] Thank you. - Yorkshirian (talk) 18:17, 7 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]
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I responded to the Wikiquette Alert regarding User:Yorkshirian and, after spending a fair bit of time reading over the diffs and examining the edit histories of several of the affected articles, along with their talk page histories, I found myself in agreement with the people who had filed the WQA. My own assessment was that Yorkshirian displayed an open disdain for people outside his own region, specifically what he considers to be minority groups. Furthermore, the original complaint included a mention of possible "racist sentiments" in Yorkshirian's comments and edit summaries. Yorkshirian had taken great personal offense at this - understandable, considering how emotionally charged the word "racist" is - but I couldn't find fault with the comment considering edit summaries such as "revert a trolling edit made by a Lancastrian".
I advised Yorkshirian that, while I had nothing to contribute to the content discussion itself (I have no knowledge of the subject), I found his behavior to be quite uncivil and in violation of several Wikipedia policies, including WP:OWN, WP:CIVIL, WP:NPA, and more generally, WP:CON. I strongly suggested that he go back and read those and other policies, make sure he is familiar with them, and that he "play by the rules" when editing Wikipedia. He does not have to agree with another editor's viewpoint, but he does need to abide by WP's policies of working toward consensus, and from what I can see, it appears he much prefers to work unilaterally on the articles in question instead.
Yorkshirian has since replied to me, saying that my advice to him was completely one-sided, and further referring to the "racist" comment as an "extreme" personal attack, even after I explained how I perceived its context. From this, it appears that he still does not believe he owns any part of this conflict, and as long as he doesn't, I believe the conflict will continue.
I'd like to add that, throughout all of this, I have found Jza, Harkey Lodger and MSRC to all be quite civil, both during the initial dispute and in the WQA page - they have done an admirable job of keeping the discussion focused on addressing Yorkshirian's behavior in a polite manner, keeping their comments limited to their own observations of his behavior, and not engaging in flame-warring. I believe they are using the dispute-resolution process well, and I find it unfortunate that Yorkshirian is not cooperating with them. Thank you.
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Proceeded to ArbCom.