I've interacted with Philip Cross many times (UK politics Wikipedia is a very small place) and found him perfectly reasonable and his edits usually well justified.
Needless to say, an anonymous critic launching a campaign complete with website and Twitter account against him for allegedly being unfair to conspiracy-mongering figures like Craig Murray and George Galloway and genocide denial specialist Neil Clark and too nice to two Jewish journalists (one considerably more outspokenly pro-Israel than the other) isn't about to change my mind...
Why don't you engage with the substance of the criticism rather than who's made it. He's made over a hundred thousand edits on Wikipedia in almost 15 years. I'm sure some of them are well justified. We're highlighting the ones that aren't and in which he has a serious conflict of interest.
To be brutally honest, the fact he's made over a hundred thousand edits on Wikipedia and the examples you choose to highlight of alleged bias include following WP policies and removing an unsourced claim about a libel suit from a biography underlies the fact that beyond Galloway et al moaning about it and Murray actually suggesting he's part of a government ' “cyber-war” op aiming to defend the “official” narrative against alternative news media', there's not a terrible amount of substance to the criticism. I'm pretty sure I've sided against him (and many other editors) in talk page disagreements over more substantial issues of possible bias than that. Similarly the screenshot suggesting that despite obviously politically disagreeing with them he apparently contributed the majority of the very fair and balanced introduction to the MediaLens article would be a point in his favour for anyone interested in the substance of the encyclopedia rather than going down the Murray rabbit hole . Admiring a figure is not a prerequisite for writing articles on them.
Sure, he has political opinions and wears them on his sleeve, but that applies to pretty much everybody else involved in political Wikipedia.
Admiring a figure is not a prerequisite for writing articles on them... Sure, he has political opinions and wears them on his sleeve, but that applies to pretty much everybody else involved in political Wikipedia.
Who said you have to admire them? He's openly hostile toward them and taunts them on Twitter. Then makes blatantly unfair edits as we've shown. Remember, we're not talking about posting your political views on your blog. This is supposed to be an encyclopedia.
I'm pretty sure the set of people who (i) know about and (ii) are neutrally disposed towards most of the political figures highlighted here is an empty one (maybe one can feel neutral towards Kamm, whose foreign policy views in the early 2000s were very wrong but I've never felt to have behaved in a particularly loathsome manner). And it's perfectly possible to contribute in a dispassionate manner about people and organizations you fundamentally dislike, as funnily enough the diff of the MediaLens article linked in the OP appears to offer evidence for...
Traditionally, Wikipedia's approach to "unfair edits" is to make a case for their reverting on the talk page, not to offer rewards for doxxing the responsible editors, launch campaign websites against them and blog about how it's likely he's part of '"cyber-war” ops aiming to defend the “official” narrative against alternative news media' and Jimmy Wales is implicated too...
(I'm not exaggerating: here's Craig Murray's take on the same thing. https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/the-philip-c...
I could insinuate that "fivefilters" must surely be part of some shadowy organization coordinating to release information hostile to Philip Cross, but I live in the real world where sometimes people have common political views and wish to share their take on things they read online...)
I'm really not sure where you're going with all this.
We haven't offered rewards for doxxing anyone. We've written an article highlighting a problem with a particular editor's behaviour on Wikipedia where he has a conflict of interest and Wikipedia is refusing to act. You seem to be talking about anything and everything except this.
George Galloway offered the reward, according to RT in the article posted above (and various other sources generally supportive of Galloway). That's... not usual behaviour.
And as I pointed out above, having a negative opinion of a subject is not a "conflict of interest", and several of the diffs, of literally thousands you could have chosen, are entirely unobjectionable. I even pointed out one above was actually removing something editors are required to remove according to Wikipedia policy. I'd expect the ratio to look rather different if he was a disruptive or agenda-driven editor, as opposed to one whose choice of commentary to include I don't always agree with. If the real interest was in the edits as opposed to promoting conspiracy theories about Wikipedia colluding with conflicted editors to damage the good name of Messrs Murray and Galloway, presumably people would be devoting their time to reasoned explanations of why X is important or Y is irrelevant in talk page discussions on article wording rather than inviting people to astroturf HN as part of their #ditchwikipedia campaign instead...
https://twitter.com/newsyc50/status/997927206167941120
If the real interest was in the edits as opposed to promoting conspiracy theories about Wikipedia colluding with conflicted editors to damage the good name of Messrs Murray and Galloway, presumably people would be devoting their time to reasoned explanations of why X is important or Y is irrelevant in talk page discussions on article wording
I'll just repeat what I said in another comment here:
What it seems you're suggesting is that those unfairly targeted on Wikipedia, as Cross is doing, should learn the labyrinthine processes Wikipedia expects to correct their entries. And then presumably to put in the same amount of time Cross is putting in (hours and hours on weekdays and weekends) to monitor their pages for more abuses from him.
Should we not be more concerned about blocking those who are clearly in the wrong here?
If there's an editorial dispute, please solve it in an editorial manner. Editors opposing Cross on Wikipedia have shown prior bad-faith activity. For example, User:Leftworks1 created over a dozen sockpuppets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investiga...) to push their viewpoint, only to get smacked by several editors including Cross repeatedly.
If there's a real editorial dispute - if anyone wanting to "correct" the bias on the articles is actively doing that, with reputable sources, and getting smacked down, then you can bring that to dispute resolution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution) and come to consensus. But yelling about Wikipedia being broken or unfairly targeting people is just bunk until you've worked through the process.
In case you think this is me telling you to submit to the bureaucracy - that's exactly what I'm suggesting. If you have a dispute in the real world, you would go to the courts and use the legal system, not just yell about it endlessly to passersby.
You have much more faith in the Wikipedia process than I do. Please read our update which highlights how a certain admin has tried to shut down debate around this from the beginning: http://wikipedia.fivefilters.org/agenda.html
I'm far from the biggest fan of Wikipedia's jargon or bureaucracy, but if there is a specific false or objectionable claim on a page it's generally a lot less time-consuming and more productive to remove it, explain why it was removed and then watch the page for future updates than spend hours searching through the responsible editor's social media accounts and then launch a campaign to ban him through multiple social media channels...
If someone is persistently editing unfairly, has a conflict of interest with many of the people he edits, you think the best thing is just to let this continue and try to put in as much time as he's putting in to watch for and challenge bad edits? Don't agree.
In my experience contentious articles are often locked for edits from the general public, require approval, or in case they are not, your edits are reverted 10 minutes later.
There is really nothing to do. Depute resolution only mentioned the damage it has done to their already besmirched reputation, Cross blanked his talk page, ( you can read all his comments and controversy in the view history, but ... get this, and this is funny, he was awarded TWO, count them TWO barn stars. He wins, Wikipedia looses, everyone looses.
"the Cross-Galloway fracas is spreading from Twitter, and threatens to damage the credibility of Wikipedia in the public eye." They are worried, but still. Nothing has been done:
"On May 14, 2018, Philip Cross acknowledged George Galloway as one of "the goons" with whom he is feuding, and 41 minutes later admitted, "Well I have a big COI now, so I probably won't edit their articles very much in future." Nevertheless, four days later, Cross has again edited this BLP."
Has anyone involved in the articles actually attempted to engage Wikipedia's normal dispute resolution procedures? I see one editor who reached out to CoI, but this editor is not actually involved in the articles.
There are far more productive Wikipedians (Cross is 308th) who are easily attributable to individuals. 30 edits a day is literally nothing - Cross probably has WP open in a tab at work and checks it like email. Someone makes a negative change to a page he's watching, and he reverts. Easy way to rack up hundreds of edits in a week. (Source: I used to do exactly this for about a year).
He's also one of the people that often posts a separate edit for almost every sentence he copy edits, which results in long strings of edits of a page over the space of an hour, when someone else with a similar amount of time on his hands might just rewrite the whole section or page, and pastes infoboxes into lots of articles he thinks its relevant for. This whole thing is reminding me of just how time consuming that was...
Of course, there theoretically could be a team being paid by number of edits to films and jazz musicians to distract from their real agenda to discredit people already enjoying roughly the same reputation as Lyndon LaRouche within the British political sphere. Some people are paid to post to social media.
Equally, if anyone can be bothered looking at the diffs of the allegedly offensive edits it could be that he's a guy whose Wikipedia obsession goes further than most and has a watchlist set up on pages he's edited and a set of brand new accounts edit warring the same unsourced claim about a Guardian journalist's beef with a Russia Today journalist into an article are the organised, if not necessarily paid, group...
It just seems like this guy is one of the more benign power editors if that's the worst that can be found among the thousand of edits. I think his bias might be overstated due to the fact that it's right leaning bias.
However there are also editors such as Volunteer_Marek that I see in almost every political or current event topic inducing a heavy left leaning bias. These bias in these edits are much more extreme and unrestrained.
I really am more concerned with the threat to call him out. While I may not agree with all his actions this idea that we can strip someone of the anonymity that makes wikipedia great because we don't agree with him is something we should all stand against. if you have to ask why, then it is as simple as understanding that yourself or editors you do like could find themselves silenced because it will bring threats
Do you seriously think Philip Cross is an actual individual ? Personally I think it a plainly obvious that it is well organised, probably well funded PR operation. Which is perfectly fine by me (I'm certainly not as naive as to think that such things are not happening for years).
What is IMHO more worrying is the apparent collusion of Wikipedia, as an organisation, with those people. M. Wales is entitled to his political opinions and water works for stuffing his wallet, but he is also walking a very very fine line...
well, I'm grateful for some of the sense in this forum. i know PC and he's one. that's it - the end of the story. but some of these twitter and blog trolls don't care about real-life consequences. I agree with Shivetya that protecting the right to anonymity - particularly in thsi vile manhunt - should be paramount. i think PC is probably experiencing a lot of stress and would welcome some more solidarity around this. twitter has been rife with speculation, people post addresses on forums, someone even posted a death threat on craig murrays blog in the comments today... i mean , come on... anyone got any suggestiosn how to handle this and de-escalate? it seems totally unwarranted (as you say, he's prolific but not even in the top 300), and is getting really serious... :(
Needless to say, an anonymous critic launching a campaign complete with website and Twitter account against him for allegedly being unfair to conspiracy-mongering figures like Craig Murray and George Galloway and genocide denial specialist Neil Clark and too nice to two Jewish journalists (one considerably more outspokenly pro-Israel than the other) isn't about to change my mind...