Guild Wars Wiki:Arbitration committee/2007-09-20-User:Erasculio

This page was created due to this request for arbitration by User:Karlos.

Issue at hand

User:Erasculio stands accused of repeatedly harrassing User:Karlos.

Decision about accepting the case for arbitration

The case for or against acceptance is on the discussion page.

Accept - Previous incidents as well as discussion following the request make it clear to me that arbitration is needed. I see this as a classic case of two users not reaching a peaceful solution on their own. --Xeeron 22:48, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Accept - Per Xeeron's comment and the talk page discussion. --Dirigible 14:39, 21 September 2007 (UTC)

Karlos' statement

I'd like to ask ArbComm to take up and evaluate my request for arbitration against Erasculio. He has been harrassing me since day 1 (for reasons beyond my comprehension as he supposedly comes from GWOnline, which I do not read/post in).

I submit as evidence his contrubtions to these discussions:

1. Guild Wars Wiki talk:Requests for adminship/Karlos
2. User talk:Gaile Gray/Archive Game-Related Topics/August 2007#GW:EN's release tomorrow...
3. Guild Wars Wiki talk:Arbitration_committee/2007-09-19-User:Skuld#Arguments for ArbComm rejecting this case

The basic premise is that he always turns the discussion personal about me, he always attacks me in his debates and is never trying to reconcile views. Basically, intimidating. While I am more than capable of matching his bully tactics, I think they are very unhealthy and I feel if not stopped he will bully many others and the wiki will only suffer because possibly good ideas will get killed by his blind zeal and his inability to rationally discuss things with users he has a "grudge" against.

I have asked him to stop this trolling and harrassment and was told off by the same type of bully tactics:

1. User talk:Erasculio#Please stop...

His rationale is constantly that I am bad. He keeps going back to the specifics of whether I am a hypocrite or not, whether I am evil or not and so forth. He does not recognize the method itself as being invalid and inapplicable in a wiki. When I had a problem with him, I went directly to him and asked him to stop and tried to reach a middle ground. He denied the existence of a problem, said it's all in my head. Now, he STILL refuses to admit he did anything wrong. And this IS the judgement I want to be made. That he has been unfair and incorrect in the way he is carrying out himself and that it needs to be told to him to cease this method of debating with people.

All his arguments of turning this about ME should be categorically disregarded because I am not asking whether or not he wronged me first or I wronged him second. I am asking that someone in this wiki tell him that he is being extemely aggressive, extremely personal in his debate style and that it's not acceptable. If, as a by product, someone wants me to be found guilty of the same, feel free to look into that.

I must make it clear this is what this request for arbitration is about. It's not mediation where we're trying to find where it all went wrong. I have no interest in that. I am clearly asking ArbComm to look into Erasculio's behavior and debate style and tell him that it's wrong. Because no one else on this entire wiki has had the guts to tell him so. This is my last resort. Much could have been different had he been told from day 1 by a few other users to tone it down.

And I seek as as judgement that he is ordered to stop and that upon furhter such interactions is blocked accordingly.

Erasculio's statement

(I apologize for repeating some of the things I have said on the talk page, but I think they are relevant to this statement). I believe the problem is how Karlos refuses to accept he has been wrong. Deep down, I see this whole mess being thanks to that issue. Going back to the Userpage Policy discussion and following reconfirmation, as soon as the consensus was made clear on how the community wanted a different view of admins than Karlos did, he accused the selection of admins as being a “popularity contest”, in which “you could not really vote your opinion honestly” (as seen here). In his own reconfirmation, instead of stopping to think and consider how he did something wrong, he is “100% certain that Gares' and Gem's votes were ‘retailliatory’ votes for my votes on their reconfirmation. Just a ridiculously bad culture” (as also seen on the previous link). When Tanaric had a disagreement with him and posted a very long comment about his thoughts, Karlos’ reply was “Your response reads, quite shamelessly, like a rosy political speech by Barak Obama” and “Just empty slogans and shameless self-advertisement”, instead of actually listening and trying to reason with Tanaric (as seen here). He is still bitter about the issue of the user pages, as seen on his comment about “the brave Xeeron, enforcer of centimeters on user pages” (seen here). He is still bitter at how the consensus had a different opinion than his own regarding the role of admins, as seen here (in which he antagonizes Tanaric with a sarcastic “the mighty Tanaric”) and on his comment about how the current admins are “brainless janitors”.

…And, he’s still bitter at me, for being against him on his reconfirmation. Karlos has stated time and time again that he does not understand why I acted against him despite how he never did anything against me (one such times may be seen on the first paragraph here), being unable to understand that I was against him because I thought he was wrong; but no, he cannot accept this possibility, so my hostility regarding him would have to come from a personal problem, and therefore be an insult. That kind of opinion – that saying he was wrong equals being offensive or being harassing – is what is the bottom of this arbitration request. In my talk page (here), he asks me to stop harassing him – yet in both his examples, I wasn’t even trying to offend him:

1) Here, I replied to his comment with nothing other than my opinion, making a correction (about the “Honor” monument and the KoaBD title track) that I made in several other places, to several other users; Karlos replied filled with hostility, ignoring my arguments for why he was wrong, and, instead of actually replying to my points, he only said vague statements such as “You seem to have missed the whole point then”. This is one of the examples he used about how I would have “harassed” him – but what was it that bothered him so much, the fact that I said the same thing I had said to others in other places? Soon after, he decided to reply to a section I wrote in the same page (here) – if my reply to him with nothing but my opinion about the issue being discussed was “harassement”, how comes his reply to what I have stated was not?

2) Here, it’s the second example he used of harassement. This one is even more clear – he posted a question in Gaile’s Talk Page, and, while I didn’t have the full answer, I tried to help him by saying what I knew, while waiting for Gaile to say something (as I have done many other times, such as here, and continued to do later; I even asked Gaile if it was bothering her, to which she replied no, although I can’t find it among her huge archives). Yet he replied agressively telling me to “hang back”, and kept using an aggressive tone (such as “why assume that Gaile is as blind as you are?”, and claiming that I was “trying to kill the topic”). Yet other users told Karlos he had misunderstood the tone of my comment; I said myself that he had misunderstood my comment; but did he listen to any of us, saying that he was wrong? No. Not only that, but later, he decided to attack me again (“For the record, and despite Mr.Erasculio's vehement assertions”), only to have Gaile herself tell him how he was being unfair. His reply? “There is more at work here than you know”. In other words, again his tendency of feeling offended whenever someone claims he’s wrong made he decided to attack me.

At the same time, he posted on my talk page, claiming I was harassing him (again, as seen here), asking me to just avoid him, and I refused; I did so because the reason behind his request (that I was harassing him) simply did not exist. I explained so to him on my talk page; I told him the intention behind my comments, but did he listen to any of it? No. Was he truly willing to reason? No. Xeeron mentioned how it would be better for us to just stop talking to each other, and then, for a different reason (not because I was harassing Karlos, rather because I learned I was not going to convince him otherwise), I decided to accept his suggestion, letting the discussion end there.

Karlos didn’t notice it. It was my mistake to not have said it with all the letters that I had decided to accept Xeeron’s idea – but what kind of harassement is that, in which I decide to completely avoid him, and the “target” of my harassement doesn’t even notice it? It was not until he asked me a question (here) and decided to mention me again in a discussion that had nothing to do with me (here) that I decided to interfere with him again.

What I would like to happen is to for me to get away from this mess – I would like if the committee decided that both me and Karlos are not allowed to talk to each other, neither to talk about each other (I don’t want a title like “the holy Aiiane”, “the mighty Tanaric” and so on). However, I don’t think it’s going to work. Karlos, again, has decided that he is right – if the admins act in a different way other than what he wants them to act, it would not be a matter about he being wrong – rather, it would be a problem of the wiki itself. This kind of statement (such as “if this wiki has any semblance of dignity to preserve, this guy's request would be shot down faster than it gets created”, about Auron’s request, or “Yet not one person had the guts to tell him the obvious” and “I expect to fail and crash and burn as I expect you and Xeeron to try and avoid taking sides and thus come up with a lame duck solution, and I expect Biro to cave in to the new ‘hip crowd’ of the wiki and decline to upset them by taking action against their pet bull-dog”, both seen here – and notice that he has just called me “their pet bull-dog”, isn’t this a NPA breach?) makes it clear to me that he is not going to respect the decision of this committee, unless it does exactly what he wants it to do (more of how he doesn’t trust the wiki here).

Of course, there are far more problems than those regarding Karlos. His statements about how he expects the admins to act (saying that, if they had dignity, they would do X) is an act of intimidation – unless the admins in fact act as he asks them to, what is implied is that they lack dignity. Same thing regading this issue – if no one tells me the “obvious”, it would be because “not one person had the guts”. If Biro does not do what Karlos wants him to, the implication is that Biro would have “to cave in to the new ‘hip crowd’ of the wiki and decline to upset them”. Karlos admits he is capable of intimidation – he claimed that “I am more than capable of matching his bully tactics” at the top of this request of arbitration against me, and he has done so and is still doing so – there are other examples, such as his comments about how those with a different opinion than him on the userpage issues were “totalitarian dictators" and a "Vocal Minority". More recently, we have him antagonizing both Xeeron and Aiiane on the arbitration request about Skuld (“the brave Xeeron, enforcer of centimeters on user pages” and “the holy Aiiane” as seen here). Notice also something interesting – no one said anything about banning Skuld permanently. Yet Karlos said “I do not think it is within ArbComm's jursidiction, nor do I honestly think we should make it within anyone's jursidiction to permanently banish people from society simply because they agitate enough other people. That's just very medival, very Nazi and very wrong” as an argument against the committee even taking Skuld’s case in consideration; on the request against Karlos himself, he stated that the creator of said request “tries to get me banned”, despite how Auron did not say anything about a ban. And then he asks for an arbitration committee against me…Where is the assumption that the arbitration committee acting equals to a ban now, especially after such speech about how he is against bans? How comes that strawman applies to Skuld and to him, yet not to me?

This entire pattern of behavior is, in my opinion, much closer to the “bully tactics” Karlos accuses me about than anything I have done – and to see him complaining about a behavior he so often indulges into is, to say the least, odd – not because he would deserve that (words he has tried to put in my mouth often), but rather for the hypocrisy in condemning what he does.

ArbComm statement

Erasculio and Karlos are both very active users on the wiki. Both are strong willed and clever and convinced of their reasoning. The history of their conflict apparently starts with Erasculio's strong and repeated voiced opposition to Karlos' Request for adminship. They also had heated arguments on the Hall of Monuments and Gaile's talk page. After these arguments, Karlos accused Erasculio of harassment on his talk page and asked him to stop stalking his edits, while Erasculio disagreed that any harassment was taking place; the discussion there stopped after a comment by Xeeron who tried to calm the situation. A few weeks later, after Erasculio decided to reply to Karlos mentioning him in another discussion, Karlos filed for arbitration.

• No objective harassment happened.

While Erasculio's discussion style is aggressive, he did not attack Karlos in an extraordinary way. The discussions addressed normal wiki topics and his answers were relevant to the topic at hand. In a community as small as the one of active wiki editors, replying to one editor on a handful of topics during several months can hardly be called stalking. Therefore Erasculio did not act out of bounds what is regarded as normal wiki behavior.

• Both users displayed very bad social skills

During the course of discussions, both users showed themselves unable to resolve what for most others would have been only a minor disagreement. After being asked to "Just leave me alone" and stop harassment, the most sensible decision would be to back off, regardless of whether the request was based on objective or only subjective perceived harassment. Likewise, when feeling harassed, it is never a good idea to use sentences like "Don't force me to ask for administrative actions against you", which very likely will be taken as threats.

Foremost the current need for arbitration due to both users extreme drive to prove that their view is right. Instead of aiming for a peaceful solution of the conflict, both had the supreme goal of proving the other wrong, no matter the cost. When "being right" becomes more important than "getting along" with each other, something has gone badly wrong.

Decision

2007 09 23
The whole conflict could have been avoided had any of the two users decided to simply shrug off the arguments of the other. Because both insisted on taking the argument one step further every time, they ended up having to call for arbitration. Therefore:

• Both users are not to address the other for 4 months. That includes editing the other user's talk page, replying directly to the other user's postings and directly or indirectly bringing up the other user in any comments.

Sysops are asked to hand a temporary ban of 3 days to any disregard of this.