K.e.coffman, editor of vandal?

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K.e.coffman, editor of vandal?

Post by Kumioko » Mon Sep 04, 2017 6:27 pm

For some time now I have been aware of an editor on Wikipedia known as K.e.coffman, who on the face of it, seems to be a positive contributor and seems to be very active. When we dig a little deeper though and start doing some deeper analysis of their contributions some disturbing trends appears. This editor seems to have made a name for themselves as a "Nazi hunter" by eliminating or minimizing anything that appears to glorify the conduct of German soldiers during World War II. Now of course no one likes the Nazi's but Wikipedia is supposed to be unbiased. That means we don't favor either side, we merely write the articles with the information available and according to Wikipedia's notability criteria and try to make them as unbiased and neutral as we can within the sources we have.

In the case of this K.e.coffman fellow however, they have basically deleted almost every Iron Cross recipient as "non notable", using Wikipedia's own notability criteria as a loophole to purge the project of these articles and has been using some other very creative ways of interpreting Wikipedia policy to justify his actions.

A review of their recent contribution history as of September 4, 2017 shows he is redirecting every Iron Cross recipient to the list pages showing the recipient . Some examples are: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ernst-Wilhelm_Modrow&diff=prev&oldid=798836126 and https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Walter_Zellot&diff=prev&oldid=798671285 but there are literally hundreds of others. He is stripping out references such as here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Knight%27s_Cross_of_the_Iron_Cross_recipients_(Ba%E2%80%93Bm)&diff=prev&oldid=798847854 and he is stripping out award details with the message of "intricate details".

Looking through their talk page archives and on other places like ANI and WikiProject Military history there have been a number of complaints about this activity, so much so K.e.coffman created this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:K.e.coffman/My_allegedly_problematic_behaviour partly to document it and partly it seems to me to gravedance and jab others at getting away with it.

Wikipediocracy has already discussed this editor a couple times in passing and I seem to remember their name coming up on Wikipedia review as well. Given this editors history, maybe we should invite them over to comment here because they seem more like they are the best player on our team destroying the project from the inside than an asset to Wikipedia.

This is the kind of editor we critics should strive to be, apparently positive but helping to Hasten the Day to the end of Wikipedia.
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Re: K.e.coffman, editor of vandal?

Post by Flip Flopped » Tue Sep 05, 2017 5:41 pm

I haven't looked at the edits even though you provided links (sorry). Would you agree that it's not unbiased to treat both sides of every argument as equally valid? For example the flat-Earthers.

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Re: K.e.coffman, editor of vandal?

Post by Kumioko » Wed Sep 06, 2017 12:45 am

I don't necessarily think they need to be equally valid, but I do think they need to be mentioned. For example, most people would agree that the Nazi's were bad, but a lot of others were bad too and if we cover one and favor the other it doesn't benefit the readers. Wikipedia shouldn't advocate one side or the other, they should just be putting information out and making it available.
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Re: K.e.coffman, editor of vandal?

Post by Flip Flopped » Wed Sep 06, 2017 1:55 am

Kumioko wrote:I don't necessarily think they need to be equally valid, but I do think they need to be mentioned. For example, most people would agree that the Nazi's were bad, but a lot of others were bad too and if we cover one and favor the other it doesn't benefit the readers. Wikipedia shouldn't advocate one side or the other, they should just be putting information out and making it available.
Can Wikipedia at least not explain all of the flat-Earther explanations for stuff like eclipses? You may not realize how detailed the flat-Earther ideas are (they've thought of everything).

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Re: K.e.coffman, editor of vandal?

Post by Kumioko » Wed Sep 06, 2017 2:20 am

Oh sure it doesn't need to have every detail, but in this case I don't think it's necessary to delete all the Iron Cross recipients either. The guy clearly has an anti German bias.
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Re: K.e.coffman, editor of vandal?

Post by Flip Flopped » Wed Sep 06, 2017 2:25 am

Kumioko wrote:Oh sure it doesn't need to have every detail, but in this case I don't think it's necessary to delete all the Iron Cross recipients either. The guy clearly has an anti German bias.
Apparently some people thought there was too much glorification of Nazis. I haven't looked into the issue enough to know what's simple historical accuracy and what's glorification. This is the kind of thing historians should decide.

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Re: K.e.coffman, editor or vandal?

Post by Strelnikov » Sun Sep 24, 2017 2:54 am

Kumioko wrote:For some time now I have been aware of an editor on Wikipedia known as K.e.coffman, who on the face of it, seems to be a positive contributor and seems to be very active. When we dig a little deeper though and start doing some deeper analysis of their contributions some disturbing trends appears. This editor seems to have made a name for themselves as a "Nazi hunter" by eliminating or minimizing anything that appears to glorify the conduct of German soldiers during World War II. Now of course no one likes the Nazi's but Wikipedia is supposed to be unbiased. That means we don't favor either side, we merely write the articles with the information available and according to Wikipedia's notability criteria and try to make them as unbiased and neutral as we can within the sources we have.

In the case of this K.e.coffman fellow however, they have basically deleted almost every Iron Cross recipient as "non notable", using Wikipedia's own notability criteria as a loophole to purge the project of these articles and has been using some other very creative ways of interpreting Wikipedia policy to justify his actions.

A review of their recent contribution history as of September 4, 2017 shows he is redirecting every Iron Cross recipient to the list pages showing the recipient . Some examples are: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ernst-Wilhelm_Modrow&diff=prev&oldid=798836126 and https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Walter_Zellot&diff=prev&oldid=798671285 but there are literally hundreds of others. He is stripping out references such as here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Knight%27s_Cross_of_the_Iron_Cross_recipients_(Ba%E2%80%93Bm)&diff=prev&oldid=798847854 and he is stripping out award details with the message of "intricate details".

Looking through their talk page archives and on other places like ANI and WikiProject Military history there have been a number of complaints about this activity, so much so K.e.coffman created this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:K.e.coffman/My_allegedly_problematic_behaviour partly to document it and partly it seems to me to gravedance and jab others at getting away with it.

Wikipediocracy has already discussed this editor a couple times in passing and I seem to remember their name coming up on Wikipedia review as well. Given this editors history, maybe we should invite them over to comment here because they seem more like they are the best player on our team destroying the project from the inside than an asset to Wikipedia.

This is the kind of editor we critics should strive to be, apparently positive but helping to Hasten the Day to the end of Wikipedia.


I see removing the Iron Cross details as a waste of time because there are all these military history websites that will list all these people's achievements (and all this stuff was well known because the various branches of the German military kept action logs and who won what in case the recipients were later killed, which happened a lot, because people were in the war for the duration of it.) There is a website called uboat.net which lists all the German submarines of both World Wars, their commanders, number of Uboatmen killed in each u-boat (sometimes WWII U-boats were strafed running on the surface and the watch crew or AA gunners would suffer casualties; most deaths were total crew wipeouts from depth charges that sunk the u-boats running submerged), the various u-boat types, the ships they sank (mostly freighters) plus known ship commanders, Allied subhunting ships that attacked u-boats in both wars, Allied submarines that tried to attack German u-boats, and articles on the technologies used (schnorkel tubes, the various types of German torpedoes, mines, etc.)....I bring it up because the site is not espousing a form of politics, it's just historical information. If I were given a choice between Iron Cross lists with all the information and lists of Pokemon, I would choose the Iron Cross lists because at least they're historical.

Now if you have articles extolling the virtues of the various Waffen-SS units, or Wehrmacht units known for killing civilians or killing Jews in "anti-partisan" operations on the Eastern Front, then you have a problem. One military historian described most of the branches of the WWII German military machine as "self-soiling" because at the same time commendable things were being done, war crimes were going on (example: the Luftwaffe's "defense of the Reich" by radar, fighters, and flak cannons was commendable, their involvement in concentration camp freezing experiments and barometric pressure experiments using inmates as guinea pigs was not). I doubt the same sorts of goofy arguments would go on if the subject was the Shah of Iran's SAVAK secret police or El Salvadorean army units from the 1980s who were involved in counterinsurgency goonery on Reagan's dime.
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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