Philip Cross

[sashi]

There's been a summary posted on the ArbCom noticeboard of a whole host of mostly innocuous edits. §. This led me to second-guess a bit, so I had a look at some of the more central complaints.

Mr. Cross is responsible for 34.8% of the characters on the Socialist Worker's Party § . NHSavage is #2 with 16.7%

on George Galloway: 60.4% §

Piers Robinson. This article has been cut from 8.2K to 2.2K since Philip Cross' last add, but he still remains the #2 editor (31%) behind Philafrenzy (52%): §

Earlier, Piers, or someone impersonating him, had come in and tried to delete some one-sided text. NeilN soft-blocked the account on the grounds that it was named for a famous person: §. A few days later Drmies came and cut out almost all of the text the account had objected to.

On the Tim Hayward entry, there was an exceptionally long editwar (both sides at >8RR, I believe), which NeilN ended by summarily blocking the person trying to add a reference to Jonathan Cook's article, "The Authoritarians who Silence Syria Questions" §. Philip Cross? Despite making no BLP / NPOV claim, just deleting the article over and over and over, no action was taken by NeilN, (because Counterpunch is not a symmemological / canonical source for any claims, not even the most straightforward ones, like the name of the "working group" Hayward & Robinson are part of, I guess.)

Even old Roland Dumas has been telling anyone who will listen that regime change has *long* been on the British agenda. But that sort of basic knowledge doesn't belong in English Wikipedia. There will be no Counterpunch, no Meyssan articles from VoltaireNet (§) noting that Assad had returned his légion d'honneur (Chirac pinning it on), that Germany had roundly stated the recent attacks were illegal, that the Russians were effective at jamming French technology, that... no, no, no. McWiki doesn't serve spicy dal. Give me seconds of that soft-serve Puffington Host, please. Slurp...

Cross likewise dismissed the Cook article from Piers Robinson's entry: §.

[CrowsNest]

Reluctantly, they have finally decided to do something.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... s_articles

Information for participants:

The scope of this case is the editing of Philip Cross in the topic area of British politics, especially as it relates to potential violations of the Biography of living persons policy and/or the Conflict of interest guideline.

The Arbitration Committee reminds participating editors that any off-wiki information should be sent privately to arbcom-l@lists.wikimedia.org rather than being posted publicly on case pages. Arbitration clerks have been instructed to remove and revision delete any material related to off-wiki information from case pages.

For the Arbitration Committee, Kevin (aka L235 · t · c) 14:48, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

It only took them two weeks to get this far.

As is normal, well into their new terms, all the new Arbs campaign promises of speeding things up and/or keeping outside observers informed as to why things seem to be going nowhere, have been forgotten.

[AndrewForson]

I occasionally look at Galloway's Twitter feed. It's quite disturbing when sometimes I find myself agreeing with some of his pronouncements. He clearly has a down on Sadiq Khan for being Mayor of London (presumably because he isn't Ken Livingstone) but his best so far

Why were grown naked men permitted to cycle naked in central London today @MayorofLondon ?

A good question, indeed. I expect one, or maybe all of them, was Philip Cross.

[CrowsNest]

I don't know what funnier, the fact that KingsIndian is posting stuff to Wikipediocracy that was noted here ages ago, or that nobody there seems to give a shit.

A guy who doesn't get the basics of NPOV, really doesn't need to be anywhere near a thread on this fool.

[AndrewForson]

According to a retweet by Galloway,

George Galloway alleges on the BBC World Service that while edits go through Philip Cross's router, it is a "cell of neo-con fanatics" with "clear political intent" by whom "vulnerable" Cross is being "ruthlessly exploited".

Orangemike was interviewed as the Wikipedian expert.

BBC link.

[sashi]

I had to check to see if the Galloway article had been purged after mis-hearing that Cross was only responsible for only 20% of the article, when in fact he's still responsible for nearly 60% of the content.

I think the BBC journalists got confused as to the usefulness of studying the number of edits (21%) rather than the percentage of authorship (60% and dwindling slowly)...

Meanwhile pinch hitter Snooganssnoogans is at the plate and appears to want some attention. An article from June 2016 (Politico) says that George Galloway agrees with Susan Sarandon and Jill Stein and thought that Clinton would do longer lasting damage than Trump. Nowhere is Galloway's suggestion that Bernie run independently mentioned. Of course this was on the table in June when there was an open offer from Stein ...

Snoog knows all that context, we talked about it during the election, but prefers to snip things out of context into history...

[CrowsNest]

The BBC have now written it all up.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-44495696

As I predicted, once it got this far, which was inevitable after a certain point, their strategy was going to backfire. That piece, in a highly trusted source, makes the uninitiated reader absolutely think Jimmy and the WMF have something to hide and are not properly investigating Cross, and certainly that Cross is either a nutter or a loser or is absolutely breaking the rules but people don't care because his targets are people like George.

Seriously, what kind of fool says no comment to reporters phoning up from the BBC? Someone who is guilty, that's who. If it were me, if this were all just one big mistake or witchunt, I'd have emailed the BBC copious amounts of evidence that proves my innocence against the charge of bias and gives an absolutely rock solid explanation about who I am, why I have the interests I do, and what my relationship is with Kamm etc.

But no. This idiot treats the BBC the same way he does RT and George. Which to us Brits, rings alarms bells. Great big massive alarm bells.

Oh, and for the record, we now have Cross caught bang to rights in an attempt to use Wikipedia for misdirection, right at the very time when misdirection benefited him and hindered those looking to hold him to account in a court of law. What kind of person posts "Andrew Philip Cross (born 1963)" on their profile page (and IIRC stated this was his real name somewhere else), which the BBC are now saying "is not the name he normally goes by outside of Wikipedia." Obviously, a person to whom truth and honesty are fluid concepts.

Cross should reflect on what it probably means for him personally, that the WMF simply sent out a canned statement to the BBC, and one that entirely misrepresented their actual powers and responsibilities too. Which was kind of stupid in of itself. Is he a government agent or a media stooge? The BBC says these claims are unproven. But wouldn't it have been nice for the WMF to say they agree? It is almost as if they feel they cannot commit such a thing to print.

[CrowsNest]

Even by Sceptre's standards, these posts on the Case Workshop page are embarrassing.

We shouldn't really be giving into the Moonbat Response Force's conspiracy theorising, even if the BBC did. Sceptre (talk) 02:38, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

This is the crux of the issue, namely that Cross has been the subject of an intimidatory campaign from some sections of the political spectrum with regards to his editing of articles relating to politics. Sceptre (talk) 18:03, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

No Wikipedia editor should be giving any assistance or credence to Galloway et al. Sceptre (talk) 22:30, 22 June 2018 (UTC)

There is a politically motivated campaign of intimidation occurring here, on these very pages of Wikipedia. What Sarah Noble, 27, of Leeds, needs to appreciate, is that her new best friend had his chance to tell the BBC who he really was and why he does what he does. He stayed silent. So they reported the facts. They even generously left out the part where one of his victims contemplated suicide. If Cross really is the victim here, then the WMF would have rallied around him with their massive resources and powerful publicity department. The community itself would certainly be making more of an effort to defend him. A mentally unstable gobshite like her, given her own record of intimidating behaviour and biased editing, is in no position to be commenting. Like Cross, she should have been banned years ago, if we are really to assume the goal of this encyclopedia is neutrality and ethics. I hope the BBC do a whole series on these delusional fucks.

[sashi]

I was quite busy at work and am very surprised how little evidence was transcribed into en-wp. I imagine the rev-delling of parts of KalHolmann's testimony (and the latter's decision to remove the entire statement) had a "chilling" effect on providing evidence...

For whatever reason, Cross' participation in the edit-war over inclusion of Cook's article in CounterPunch on Tim Hayward (§§) was not even mentioned (unless it was deleted and revdelled by the Mobcar clerk).

• Cross' 1st reversion was on 12 May 21:47.
• Cross' 8th reversion was on 13 May 00:07.

I am very surprised that nobody mentioned the fact that NeilN turned a blind eye to Cross' actions here while blocking his opponent. Perhaps Cross going to 8RR was justified on suspicions (later confirmed by checkuser according to NeilN) of the high crime of sockpuppetry. Insofar as Leftworks1 (the accused/checkused sockmaster) never edited the entry in question (except as Cint4198), I'm not sure how relevant it is to the question of whether it was OK for Philip Cross to editwar to eliminate any reference to Jonathan Cook's article. It just feels like Cross is using their insider status to lord it over a junior editor in a content dispute over whether The Times "smear" / "associative fallacy" should be left unbalanced by a Counterpunch "defense". Wikipedia doesn't like when one individual shows (via socks) how multiple pages are being "stewarded" by the same insider.

Contrary to what I wrote above (in small print), Philip Cross only deleted one of two references to the Counterpunch article on Piers Robinson. Kashmiri deleted the other one after being notified of the ANI case by Philip Cross on 31 May, arguing that both the attack & defense were an "association fallacy" and that that particular fight in the press should be relegated to the (non-existent) working group entry rather than be fought out on the BLP page of the group's living members. (Essentially in agreement with the BLP claims advanced by the sockpuppet NeilN blocked.)

Anyone know this Kashmiri person?

Also, as I mentioned above, Snoo-gans' edits on George Galloway are worthy of note while speaking of the evidence in "BLP issues on British Politics Articles" (§§).

Galloway continued on Twitter, attacking Clinton as unable to compete in a general election with Trump. He urged Sanders, who like Galloway’s Respect Party backs a policy agenda based in democratic socialism, to run a third-party campaign for president with Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein as his running mate.

“Trump is a monster. Clinton a bigger monster. And he is sure going to monster her,” Galloway wrote in a second tweet.

Snoo's source

Garsh. Without that second tweet, the first tweet:

In the 2016 presidential election, Galloway favored [[Donald Trump]] over Hillary Clinton, saying "Hillary Clinton is even more dangerous for America and the world than is Donald Trump." source

has been stripped of some part of its meaning, hasn't it? Oddly, there aren't any helpful blue-links to the LEV entry at Wikipedia to help explain the monsters BLP subjects "favor". (Cf. Halle, Chomsky §§).

This is conduct fully within the rules at Wikipedia. There is nothing in the behavioral guidelines about cherry-picking decontextualized tweets as long as you don't have a (declared) formal conflict of interest.

Snoopining gotcha' into the central wikiworks may well be against the spirit of various content policies (due, primary, NPOV, etc.), but it cannot be sanctioned unless it violates behavioral guidelines.. and you won't find the term "cherry-picking" (or anything similar) in the guideline on -- for example -- disruptive editing (WP:DE). You *do* find it in WP:GAME, but funnily enough only with reference to "cherry-picking policy" when wiki-lawyering to include content.

George's entry was full protected by Amanda DQ (who claims to do various back-end tasks on her user-page, stuff like MobCar, checkuser, etc. ...). On the Snoog's version. I suppose she's one of the rouge admins? Of course in as long an entry as Cross has made for Galloway, I don't suppose a little blue-ink association with Trump matters much... ^^

[CrowsNest]

From WP:BLP.......

The idea expressed in meta:Eventualism—that every Wikipedia article is a work in progress, and that it is therefore okay for an article to be temporarily unbalanced because it will eventually be brought into shape—does not apply to biographies. Given their potential impact on biography subjects' lives, biographies must be fair to their subjects at all times.

I take that to mean anyone who inserts text into a biography that they know lacks context, even if what they have added is sourced, is violating WP:BLP. Since all the required context is contained in the source snoog used, it can be assumed this was not a mistake. He deliberately broke BLP. The victim is someone who most Wikipedians don't like, for political reasons. He faced no consequences for it. Welcome to Wikipedia.