User:Andrew Lancaster/PB666

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There is a wall of words concerning the editing and talk page behavior of User:Pdeitiker aka PB666. There is a growing suspicion that this is part of a deliberate effort to achieve certain personal goals, and make it difficult to track or criticize. Because he has targeted several articles I have worked on, it has become important to keep note of the facts. Some of the following has been discussed at 2 ANI cases [1], [2] both initiated by me, and also in an RfC case initiated by User:Muntuwandi (aka Wapondaponda) [3] concerning WP:OR. My first submission there can be seen here.

Alternative format of draft

Statement of the dispute

1. There are on-going concerns about this author which have been raised by all editors who have ever worked with him on any article, as can be seen by examining his editing record going back several years. From the point of view of the person now making the RFC, interaction has been over the last 6 months and has been discussed at 2 ANI cases [4], [5] both initiated by me, and also in an RfC case initiated by User:Muntuwandi (aka Wapondaponda) [6] concerning WP:OR. My first submission there can be seen here. In the last one, it was suggested by neutral parties that the level and depth of the tendentiousness meant that an RFC was a more appropriate course of action.
2. Right now, he is currently involved in a long drawn out edit war, which he apparently thinks is not an edit war because not breaking 3R. See basically the same edit one over and over and over: [7],[8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], etc. etc. That this is against the judgement of all other editors active on this article has been made clear repeatedly, most recently here.
3. It has always been tempting to ignore this editor. Bringing in neutral parties is difficult because the talk page behavior is extremely tendentious, breaking virtually every guideline constantly, and most notably publishing enormously long and unreadable "blogs" and making communication virtually impossible on those talkpages. See archives of talk pages for articles such as Talk:Coeliac disease for older examples, and more recently Talk:Haplogroup R1a (Y-DNA) and Talk:Mitochondrial Eve, as well as User talk:Pdeitiker, and User talk:Andrew Lancaster.
4. More generally all editing in articles by this user is poor quality, long winded, constantly off on tangents, unreadable, and most importantly also very tendentious - which combination he apparently considers WP:BOLD, but which other editors consider to be reckless, and often apparently WP:SPIDERMAN acts aimed at WP:POINT making.
5. By his own repeated assertions, the main driving aims of most edits are emotional grudges and the desire to publish his original ideas, often extremely odd ones, or at least remove any reference to theories in opposition to his. (PB666 would probably prefer to say that his most common tactic involves trying to push others to do the editing, which is not actually in disagreement with this description.) Threats to make certain editing actions if others are not made, tit for tat, are made without shame. (Example [15], [16] citing actions of another user on another article as justification, [17].)
6. Pushing around others. By his own account this user sees his efforts as part of a bigger project to direct other editors to effect sweeping changes to perhaps 100 related articles in the same way recently as being attempted on R1a and Mitochondrial Eve. The changes would involve both content which is less "genuflecting" to the sloppy morons who get published in this field, and his concept of "encyclopedic" style. These changes are for the most part openly connected to bad feelings this user has about the whole sub-field of Y-DNA and mitochondrial DNA, as opposed HLA DNA which is own field of specialization. He feels the field gets an unfair amount of attention, and that the published authors in the field are morons who get away with too much speculation.

Desired Outcome

1. That this user would either work strictly by the spirit of Wikipedia guidelines, or else reduce or stop interventions in these articles where he clearly has a grudge and an unconstructive approach that brings him into constant conflict with others, to the detriment of both editing and talk page discussion. Realistically, because this users judgment of other people and of the "spirit" of guidelines is so poor, actions which will achieve this are unlikely to involve subtle hints and advice.
2. Based on previous attempts to bring in admins or neutral observers, which failed to give clarity, it is considered highly desirable that we get very clear statements and actions where reviewers of this case see policies are being broken. Note apparent agreement of user himself that clarity of policies is an issue for him: [18]. (In any case see this gloating supposèd summary of this and this on ANI: "As for the guidelines other than the reference issue for the main page, did anyone on ANI correct my interpretation? So aren't you then trying to promote your point of view regarding guidelines, running a little R1a mutiny of Wikipedia."[19])
3. Admins can judge for themselves, but I think any attempt at purely verbal admonishment will not be read in the right way.

Applicable Polices and Guidelines

WP:TEND, WP:DIS, WP:TALK, WP:POINT, WP:CIVIL, WP:AGF, WP:OR, WP:NEUTRAL, WP:FRINGE, WP:SYNTH, WP:DUE

Draft summary

• Talk pages:

• Extraordinarily long, irrelevant, and emotional postings, distracting away from practical communication.
• Constant failures of basic etiquette, such as posting without signing, editing content of his own postings after responses have been posted, inserting his comments everywhere, taking no heed of indentation or format, and generally making it impossible to follow what happened in any discussion. This is despite years of complaints from virtually all editors who have come across him.
• While this user cites rules like WP:AGF, and WP:PA very often, he seems to work in a directly opposed way. He either honestly has no ability to understand the rules, or else he is willingly playing with them.
• Refusing to answer questions clearly, or make a clear case for something, or make a direct response:-

• Diverting with very big irrelevant "essay" postings as per WP:SOUP (up to approx 20,000 bytes) Just one example: [20]
• When questions are very straightforward, simply ignoring them as per WP:TEND.[21], [22], [23], etc.

• Giving orders:

• Setting deadlines for other editors based on personal desires, often attached to various types of threats
• Setting goals such as passing GA review (by a deadline)
• Referring to article quality reviews done by himself during disputes, as if done by a third party
• Posting comments in the project boxes where neutral observers normally post
• Telling people what to work on
• Telling people not to post disagreements with him on talk page

• Peppering discussion with obviously exaggerated, incorrect, irrelevant and distorted "facts"...

• About other editors, i.e. ad hominem remarks
• About Wikipedia rules:-

• Formatting. Referring to people who disagree on even minor formatting issues as people working against all Wikipedia rules.
• Content. For example making accusations of OR, or includes tags in articles, based openly upon:-

• Material which he does not debate being in the literature, but which has no citation.
• Material which he does not debate being in the literature, but which he disagrees with personally.

• About the comments of third parties who have commented in the past, such as admins, reviewers, editors visiting the talkpage to remark specialist concerns, etc.

• supposed summary of this and this ANI case: "Go to the ANI, you will see clearly they tell Andrew 1. Take a few days away from editing 2. He has ownership issues, which he argued with one editor about. OTOH, I left a 1 paragraph response." [24] "As for the guidelines other than the reference issue for the main page, did anyone on ANI correct my interpretation? So aren't you then trying to promote your point of view regarding guidelines, running a little R1a mutiny of Wikipedia."[25]

• Article editing:

• This user clearly thinks that if 3R is avoided, he is not edit warring, even if he is making the same deletion over and over (with stepping up in extremity and aggression, which on talk pages he explains as being as a reaction to deletions of his work on other articles) and it has been excessively debated on the talk page. See for example on R1a, basically the same edit one over and over and over: [26],[27], [28], [29], [30], [31], [32], [33], etc. etc. (These are the majority of article edits this user has done for approximately one month so far from late December until late January.)
• Long periods of low activity with threats on talk page [34], and then sudden bursts of "WP:SPIDERMAN" activity seemingly mainly designed to make a WP:point (also as per his own talk page explanations, and edit summaries), and to push others to do certain things. (For detailed examples with diffs see [35]:-

• Removal of whole sections or references to particular theories he does not like
• Starting major changes, such as change in citation formatting, or an article split, but leaving the text in an unfinished state
• Persistent tendency to WP:OR/WP:SYNTH. [36], [37], [38], [39], [40] (in this last example PB666 clearly states that his personal remarks about the literature are NOT irrelevant to Wikipedia, and as an explanation, he compares it to a case where someone sent him an article he had not read, and in that case he changed Wikipedia on that basis).

• WP:AXE to grind, by his own account:-

• Without any other facts, based on 10,000s of edits here on a wide variety of pages, I conclude that I have the better representation of reality. Therefore I am going to be disgruntled and gripe about the issue as I prepare mentally before going through 100 poorly written pages based on awful molecular anthropology to fix an issue of carelessness. If someone out there doesn't want me (self-admitted Y-DNA skeptic) doing resectioning of their precious Y-DNA pages I suggest they take the initiative. [41]
• You wanna know why the Y-DNA pages are in such bad shape, one simple reason, all the worshipers at the alter of the Y-chromosome (Male divinity) that edit these pages are so blinded by the latest saying of their favorite pundit that they never sit down to check the facts and the history.[42]
• You have to learn to be far more critical of these results. Frankly I am glad that wikipedia disallows the demonstration of Cline maps. Sharma Figure 1 and Figure 4 are so troubled by ascertainment bias I am surprised it got published. As I stated you guys really don't want someone who is so critical of Y chromosomal studies (a 20 year disaster in the making that has only recently improved), from a global molecular anthrology story[43]
• I have 25 years experience in a pattern of mis-assumptions about statistics that never seem to stop repeating itself. [44]
• I have seen my fair share of highly imaginative 'extrapolations' of origins based on the Y-chromosome. Its a shame people don't have the same interest in HLA as they have in Y-chromosome. [...] As a consequence the spread from Africa of Y-chromosome is problematic and inconsistent with two independent sets of facts.

1. Either the molecular clock of Y is incorrect or subject to change of unknown cause.

2. Or there is a global pattern social/sexual selection that has been acting for long periods of time.[45]

• I repeat, there is nothing magical about Y-DNA that makes it immune to the same sources of variance that any other loci have. Again, I have focused on the whole of molecular anthropology, not just one little cravat niche, where cliche norms have evolved as a cover for really relaxed standards.[46]

Examples to be given diffs, of types of problems which are repeating

Many diffs have already been collected in below sections, but they'll start to be collected here also.

OR, SYNTH, NEUTRAL and the apparent grudge

• exhortations to improve Wikipedia in violation of WP:OR, WP:SYNTH, WP:NEUTRAL, and WP:UNDUE: [47], [48], [49] (in this last example PB666 clearly states that his personal remarks about the literature are NOT irrelevant to Wikipedia, and as an explanation, he compares it to a case where someone sent him an article he had not read, and in that case he changed Wikipedia on that basis).

• sub-section: evidence that there is a bigger programme and a big grudge or WP:AXE to grind:-

• Without any other facts, based on 10,000s of edits here on a wide variety of pages, I conclude that I have the better representation of reality. Therefore I am going to be disgruntled and gripe about the issue as I prepare mentally before going through 100 poorly written pages based on awful molecular anthropology to fix an issue of carelessness. If someone out there doesn't want me (self-admitted Y-DNA skeptic) doing resectioning of their precious Y-DNA pages I suggest they take the initiative. [50]
• You wanna know why the Y-DNA pages are in such bad shape, one simple reason, all the worshipers at the alter of the Y-chromosome (Male divinity) that edit these pages are so blinded by the latest saying of their favorite pundit that they never sit down to check the facts and the history.[51]
• You have to learn to be far more critical of these results. Frankly I am glad that wikipedia disallows the demonstration of Cline maps. Sharma Figure 1 and Figure 4 are so troubled by ascertainment bias I am surprised it got published. As I stated you guys really don't want someone who is so critical of Y chromosomal studies (a 20 year disaster in the making that has only recently improved), from a global molecular anthrology story[52]
• I have 25 years experience in a pattern of mis-assumptions about statistics that never seem to stop repeating itself. [53]
• I have seen my fair share of highly imaginative 'extrapolations' of origins based on the Y-chromosome. Its a shame people don't have the same interest in HLA as they have in Y-chromosome. [...] As a consequence the spread from Africa of Y-chromosome is problematic and inconsistent with two independent sets of facts.

1. Either the molecular clock of Y is incorrect or subject to change of unknown cause.

2. Or there is a global pattern social/sexual selection that has been acting for long periods of time.[54]

• I repeat, there is nothing magical about Y-DNA that makes it immune to the same sources of variance that any other loci have. Again, I have focused on the whole of molecular anthropology, not just one little cravat niche, where cliche norms have evolved as a cover for really relaxed standards.[55]

Spiderman incidents and the rapid development of new grudges

• WP:Spiderman incidents, all apparently aimed to make a breakthrough in taking over the articles and starting an OR programme of reforming all haplogroup articles, and which all lead to increasing animosity (I'd say grudges) generally...

• the attempted article split of R1a

• initial proposal [56] and replies explaining why it would not work [57]
• The removal of material from R1a [58]
• removal of even all talkpage material [59]
• initial announcement AFTER splitting, and replies to it, expressing concern: [60], [61], [62]. Also see diffs concerning User:MarmadukePercy below.
• Initially he accepted the split had not worked well, [63], but then he suddenly posted this un-called for and aggressive remark: [64]

• the GA review, requested for the wrong reasons [65], [66] and then turned into a fiasco when he go impatient and started writing on the review page himself [67] followed by anger expressed at how it had been supposedly sabotaged [68], [69]
• the odd attempts of re-writing the lede, supposedly to remove jargon, but increasing the jargon, and then getting very aggressive when his draft [70] was commented upon [71], [72], eventually just posting it anyway, with even basic errors that had been commented upon still included [73]
• PB666's own fringe theory about languages coming from Anatolia to India!! [74], [75]. (The person PB666 cites as having raised his concerns, User:DinDraithou never raised any such concerns, and felt his concerns were covered by edits I made soon after he raised them. [76])
• the odd use of the comments box as if he is an outside neutral [77]. When raised again [78], he reduced the size but when I tried to open discussion on the talkpage [79] he accused me of "getting all peeved about the 3 remaining comments, and then going biserk" and "carrying on the war ... working his Maelstorm" [80].

• Highly exaggerated responses, clearly intended to give an false impression about what is being responded to.

• Use of bold format shows I am going irrational: [81], and this is still a theme: [82]
• this level of critique can be consider an ad-hominim attack [83]
• It could almost be interpreted that by excessive points of discussion you might want to obstruct the improvements or replacement of your text, is this your intent?[84]

• sub-section: the constant attempts to say the argument is not with PB666, but with some authority:-

• Wikipedia defined in some vague way [85], [86],
• Wikipedia:MOS. [87], [88], [89]

sub section. There were some specific MOS violations I made which were actually named, but nothing in MOS could ever be found to support these positions.:

• The use of bullet points in an article
• The use of Harvard citations, an argument he had previously made on another article [90] and when this became a hopeless argument, the argument was diverted into being against the use of "et al." in citation templates with long lists of authors. Admin User:DGG eventually pointed out that this was not an issue.
• The insufficient lengths of both the article lede, and any sub-section ledes.

• The GA reviewer, who never posted anything, and left once they saw why/how the review had been called for.
• A WP:DEADLINE
• Another editor, who actually never said any such thing
• A project reviewer, which was actually PB666 himself [91]

The wall of words problem

• Obviously attempts to avoid responding to direct questions by writing a "wall of words" as per WP:SOUP. I'll be humane and not give too many examples [92]

Apparent attempts to create confusion and conflict

• Attempts to create confusion and conflict between me and other editors, in order to gain a semblance of consensus: [93], [94], [95], [96], [97]
• Attempts to confuse consensus by latching on to single issue "visitors" (individuals or individual with special interest in Iran and positions very similar to blocked User:Cosmos416: [98], [99], [100], [101]
• frequent accusations without diffs, and without any foundation at all [102], [103]
• harassment of other editors as defined by WP:HA

• harassment of User:Andrew Lancaster

• that his aim is for me to go through things I do not want and will not enjoy, in order to be part of his project to change all haplogroup articles...

• unbearable and adrenalin wrenching process by which one learns [104]
• [105], [106], [107], [108], [109]
• Thank you, since this is the first Y-article to challange at this level, keep in mind that the concepts and structures we use here may be precedences for reorganizing that page. This is mainly for Andrew's benefit, because I will not take part in the process of elevating that page.[110]

• that he increasingly sees himself in a zero-sum game struggle with me for control...

• I am the one person he can't deal with. ... He does not have the upper hand. [111]

• harassment of User:MarmadukePercy: [112], [113], [114], [115], [116], [117]
• harassment of User:Muntuwandi: [118], [119]
• asking User:Hxseek to post elsewhere

• argumentative and misleading edit summaries.[120]
• Complaints which seem to be in conflict with each other and basically nonsensical.

• This is argumentative, my focus is on improvement not discussion, all effort in discussion will not improve the page, you seem to think that the grand effort should be in the argument, I think the grand effort should be in discussion.[121]
• "Andrew you are gobbling a significant amount of time with pedestrian misunderstanding and continued unwarranted reversions of the lede." [122], "The page has grown by 10 kb just in the last week, its now becoming a hard read. I fell asleep in the origins section. Some areas are becoming increasingly difficult to read, in and of themselves."[123] versus his reaction to this proposal which was, a long time later "These talk pages will eventually scroll backwards in the archival oblivian, as talk pages often do, some talk pages have 30 archives, if we can get a decent page here done with only 3 then I would not be too complaining. What is important that the footprint of the Mainpage." [124]
• The one issue, the infobox is just one issue, you said gee we need this level of explanation for people who come here from the commercial organization FTDNA. Wikipedia is not an arm of FTDNA, we have not obligation to them, in fact WP is expressly the opposite. So one does wonder why you defend certain edits so fervously? [125], being a reply to [126]

Some other key moments

"Arrival" at R1a: [127]

"Arrival" at E1b1b: his first edit on E1b1b, the deletion of a whole sub-section which in an area he was not familiar with, in context of his first talkpage comment there. (Note that the reason for investigating was a call for opinions about a COI accusation. Apparently this was a subject he had feelings about because of past experiences on Wikipedia. But the COI accusation was retracted and resolved without him taking part in that discussion. He did however give me advice including the creation of sock puppets [128])

The first ANI case

Un-needed, eccentric, and aggresive, "help"

After a long period of having him give comment over my shoulder while I tried to rebuild R1a, an article which had a long history of problems, and which I brought to a stable form, User:Pdeitiker went unilateral almost 2 weeks ago and started to over-write the entire article in order to make a WP:POINT to me personally (ad hominem though not an attack in any simple sense), about how to be encyclopedic in writing style. I should, he says, be pushing myself to get articles to GA standard. If I do not he will take actions. But, not only are his edits very ill-informed and written in poor English according to the other active editor of R1a in recent time User:MarmadukePercy, but also this User's record shows, that his writing style, and his talkpage manner, are not good according to everyone he has contact with. His behavior is also constantly on the limits of Wikipedia policy, both on talkpages and while editing articles. Diffs of just some examples...

That it is to make a point to me personally:

• The page will not self-improve if you also do not self-improve. [129]
• Again, this should be your baby, and there are about 6 days left before GA occurs, if by that time we haven't gotten around the basic issues of style and working, then I might replace the sections. However I would hope that you will take the initiative at this point, looking at other GA articles and these edits go about making the repairs yourself. I will focus on the lede, henceforth.[130]
• Of course the althernative is I could wait this out and plop a new lede and nomenclature section in before review. This should be your baby, your kind of like a food critic that never lites a stove to boil a pot of water.[131]
• [132]
• Andrew, the time for arguing is over. Either the page improves or it does not, Marmadukes criticism aside, this page has existed since 2005, that is 4 years, and it is still start class. WP:BOLD is exactly for these circumstances where things do not move along. I have set a deadline, if you guys want to tag team revert what I do that is fine, I am not starting an edit war. Both of you agree with each other, if you cannot, in agreement find a way to bring that pages quality up to standard, then please step back. Read the class guidelines and work toward bringing the pages quality up. The reason the page is still start class is because of all the unwarranted speculation dressed up as theory.[133]
• Thank you, since this is the first Y-article to challange at this level, keep in mind that the concepts and structures we use here may be precedences for reorganizing that page. This is mainly for Andrew's benefit, because I will not take part in the process of elevating that page.[134]

Note consistently giving WP:DEADLINEs for action.

• I am giving you ample opportunity to make the requested corrections in your own words. Since you are here arguing with me then it indicates you desire not to make the change and therefore justifies the reversion. Simply stated you are acting in abstinence to the guidelines. [135]

Pretending his advice, and deadlines, represents the demands of some sort of authority in Wikipedia (various forms) who is watching:

• you are not arguing with me, you are arguing with Wikipedia [136]
• [137]
• If you do not start following the MOS I will simply revert your edits back to my last edit. Your edits are clearly exemplary of WP:OWN because you do not want review the guidelines before making edits and/or reverting edits and will be a stumbling block for GA review. You must familiarize yourself with WP:MOS in progressing further until you do so further discussion here is futile. Am I making myself clear?[138]
• If I had split off R1a1a article the article would be done now and in compliance with WP:MOS, you are simply creating the need for more edits and more reorganization because you refuse to read the MOS. Get your act together! [139]
• There can be no doubt, you clearly have a problem complying with Wikipedia guidelines. If you cannot comply with wikipedia guidelines please stop editing.[140]

Accusations of bad faith, instead of properly responding to attempts to communicate about article-related concerns. For example:

• Again, I do not see it that way, you lace all your comments with ad-hominim attacks. I was simply trying to provide you with a template by which to go forward and you dragged me into this refute that, explain this, why is yours better than mine, and highly nit-picky attitude. (This is about a draft which he supposedly made for discussion [141], and which he later, after not answering any of the concerns, did post into the main article [142].)
• Again this level of critique can be consider an ad-hominim attack and aligns itself with statements you have made which align with WP:OWN. [143]
• It could almost be interpreted that by excessive points of discussion you might want to obstruct the improvements or replacement of your text, is this your intent? [144]

Showing that the threats of massive unilateral edits is real; in areas where he is either not well-informed about the reasons for previous consensus, and where he knows that he is definitely or probably editing against consensus.

• See his first edit on E1b1b, the deletion of a whole sub-section which in an area he was not familiar with, in context of his first talkpage comment there.

Note that the reason for investigating was a call for opinions about a COI accusation.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:48, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Andrew complains about my actions on the E1b1b page but here is what I added to that page, reminding everyone that I am extremely skeptical of the Y-DNA work. I have no vested interest in Y-DNA at all. I was only trying to help him and other editors on the pages out. E1b1b_ancestry.png, E1b1b_phylogeny.png, Y_Hap_EM-81.PNG, Y_Hap_EM-123.PNG, E1b1b1a_phylogeny.png, Y_Hap_EM-78.PNG

All of these images were made from Wikimaps and scratch. Some of these images, I might add replaced images that were uploaded by Andrew and were deleted from Wikipedia for copyright violations. In addition I found errors in Andrews source of data which I reported back to him. I have always been trying to help Andrew. I helped to rewrite key sections of that page and that appeared to stabilize an edit war between Andrew and 2 other editors. Again Andrew does not see eye-to-eye with me on the cause. My opinion is that instead of adding gobs of data to these articles, he should be working, first, to make the material in the articles available to a general reading audience. If his thoughts and analysis are understood, IMHO, this would go a long way to stopping the perennial edit wars. He does not look at the issue like this.PB666 ^yap 03:17, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

• Splitting of R1a article [145], [146], etc, though not understanding how the information about the two new split subjects should be split. (See, before the split, [147], my responses to proposal, [148], [149] after the split [150], and my explanations[151], [152], then: [153].)

Talkpages are a major problem with this editor. There are so many examples there is not point giving diffs, though I can, of:-

• he frequently leaves comments unsigned
• he comes back to edit his remarks long after they have been responded to, making it impossible to follow discussion
• his indenting seems almost random
• he is prone to writing extremely long responses
• his responses are so poorly written some times, that their intended meaning can only be guessed at
• his responses very often do not stick the point, and are not responses as such at all (a characteristic which is particularly frustrating in such long postings)
• he often seems not to read the responses which come back to him, but to go one writing postings anyway

I have also now had cases where he seems to have deliberately decided to edit my own postings in order to change the overall impression to the casual reader: [154], [155]

There are several practical problems.

• First we have a complete over-write of the article. Here is a diff to my last version before ceasing to edit R1a, showing the style of changes: [156]. The differences are not to do with the science, but by both our accounts to do with style. I believe this is the opposite of improvement.
• Second I have a sort of variation on the stalker theme here, except that this person believes he is some kind of kung-fu master mentor, putting me through difficult experiences in order to make me strong. PDeitiker is already announcing publicly that he wants me to work on R1b next, according to his model [157]. Needless to say, I can not improve articles while this is happening.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:48, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

• • Regardless of the content dispute, Pdeitikers removal of entire sections from talkpages and marking the edits minor are completely unacceptable for a start. (See [158], [159] as noted above) Exxolon (talk) 22:15, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

It is only a start. I should perhaps point out that I am not well versed in how many examples I should give here, and I stopped when I started finding it too long. There are many more, but they are so easy to find if you look at his talkpage, mine, and R1a and its talkpage.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:42, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

BTW, concerning content, I think there is no dispute in any simple sense. The talkpage remarks show User:Pdeitiker constantly asking me to explain the subject matter, and when pressed concerning the knowledge reflected in his own edits, he has constantly pointed out that he is mainly teaching me about encylopedic style, and giving me a template of how to re-write more Y haplogroup articles in the future. He has indeed become quite annoyed about my argumentative nit-picking about things like "wordage" which can be fixed later in his opinion. Here is a draft of a section which he supposedly made so I could raise concerns: [160]--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:48, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

If your objective was to annoy, then you succeeded. What I saw Andrew was when I went about changing what you had done you became increasingly childish, and the more I attempted to change the more WP:OWN became an aspect. But Andrew I am not holding a grudge against you, I understand where you are coming from, the problem is you are going to have to shift your attitude for these pages to improve, because as long as you balk at Wikipedia guidelines and attempts to apply them to articles, you will have very little success at promoting and getting others to help you protect your pages.PB666 ^yap 23:13, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Why don't you do these people a favor and show them examples of your behavior over the last week. hmmmmmm. This would be a real nice test of your objectivity, particularly as a NPOV editor.PB666 ^yap 23:13, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

You are the one making an accusation. Why don't you show a diff? I have not even been editing in this period. Concerning being an NPOV editor, the record shows that throughout many discussions, you have always treated me as one until I disapproved of your article split attempt. (Your first comment: "You are however right, I knew this was going to be complicated deal and I was hoping to create the page in a sandbox. However, it was already created."[161]) After I asked "please let's first create a situation where we can understand what we are reading" you immediately posted on my talkpage accusing me of WP:OWN[162]. Since then you have been a textbook disruptive editor, out to make a wp:POINT--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:56, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

• BTW, if you review 72 carefully you will note that I did not remove an entire section, I moved that section to a new section as there were getting to many offsets. Some, very few passages of mine and Andrews comments were deleted. So to clear up that issue, no entire section was deleted from the talk-page.PB666 ^yap 05:24, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

• I removed those sections from the talk page because they were false statements made by Andrew against me repeatedly, when I finally showed him that these were indeed false statements I removed the argument only those specific aspects of the argument that pertained to the false statements.

Andrew has:

• acting more and more inappropriately with me
• I have tried my best to keep the argument civil
• he continues to push incivility and inappropriate remarks. Even on the present talk-page, saying I was wrong or did not understand even though I retained his good faith edit of a cladogram that was an improvement of my edit.
• He has been hesitant to improve the page following guidelines.
• He keeps claiming an issue regarding section titling was solved when the only person now on wikipedia part of that discussion was him. The other participant noted "In closing, I would like to remind everyone that the hierarchical haplogroup nomenclature, like the field itself, has been changing very rapidly; to illustrate this, take a look at Y haplogroup trees from 2002, 2005, 2006, 2007, early 2008, and mid 2008." which is in agreement with my POV that section heads should use the version of clade representation which is least likely to change, least likely to break Page#section wikilinks.
• he does not want to repair his reference style, which has everything in the reference list truncated to {{citation |last = Author et al. |....
• When I converted the WP:MOS undesired bullet list to paragraph form, he reverted it.
• And BTW Andrew has also forgotten on two occassions to sign his talk page sections
• He has constantly gotten into edit-wars with other people, particularly on the E1b1b page, the page has not really improved since July when I tried to help him improve the page.

Andrew has blamed me for:

• wanting section headers that would be stable.
• Not explaining to him things found in WP:MOS (such as frowned upon bullet list and number lists)
• For changing my position when better evidence has come forth warranting a change of position.
• For changing the subsection ledes to make them more explanatory. The section lede for being reflective of the articles size and content in the article. PB666 ^yap 23:13, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Accused me of making false statements when in fact he was making false statements, when I showed him his false statements he did not apologize, and in fact I deleted those false statements as much as I could from the page without rendering on the other issues. PB666 ^yap 23:13, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

• This is the way it has been for the last week or so, I am trying to help prepare this article the best that I can for GA refereePB666 ^yap 23:13, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

Again you should read his comments about the applicability of WP guidelines throughout the discussion.PB666 ^yap 23:13, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

You guys are going to have fun with this one.PB666 ^yap 23:16, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

BTW, Since we are digging back into the past, take a look at this page Haplogroup_E1b1b_(Y-DNA) and this page Haplogroup_E1b1b1a_(Y-DNA). These are the better versions, this is what I had to deal with in Late june. I worked on the first few sections of E1b1b trying to improve readability but gave up because the task was just a nighmare. This is what I was asked to walk into and referee [163], very little progress has been made on making either page more encyclopedic since I last edited those pages. Compare the E1b1b then with the R1a page now, and you can see at least some influence of what my intentions are. What you really need to ask Andrew is why isn't he working one making his two favorite Y-DNA pages more encyclopedic, more accessible to the casual reader. This is really the very heart of the issue, when I have pushed the encyclopedias agenda, what I have gotten is a very unpleasant response.PB666 ^yap 07:46, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

You are indeed pushing your interpretation of the encyclopedia's agenda: fighting against Harvard citations, "et al.", bullet points, numbers in fraction form etc, and using any number of indirect ways to make a big WP:point. It is a good definition of why I have come to ANI instead of an arbitrator or the Wikiquette forum, in order to discuss you as a disruptive editor with an on-going issue. There are people who believe that being an extremist for a good cause is not being an extremist. That approach does not work on Wikipedia.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:50, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Nearly every edit warrior on Wikipedia believes that their POV is the Wikipedia POV.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:52, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

• I'll start" one: The current state of the article is better than it was a month ago. two: It is policy that if references are done consistently in one style in an article, we add additional references in the same style, rather than change everything to whichever style we prefer. three: We do not remove our opponent's comments from a talk page four: it might be a good idea for both of you to work on something else for a week or two. DGG ( talk ) 00:00, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

• DGG I selectively removed the comments from the talk page because they were false statements that were eventually proven to be false that Andrew admitted that he did not remember that he had placed yet another bullet list, the one I corrected to paragraph form. I refactored in what I thought were wiki guidelines, to remove unnecessarily inflammatory material when it is no longer germane to any discussion. That issue was resolved, IMHO, and we no longer needed to deal with who reverted whose correction of a bullet list. It was done in good faith.PB666 ^yap 00:48, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

• Also, DGG I disagree with you on the references, at least as they were being used. There were so many Harvard references dropped into text of certain pages that the pages almost became a dirty laundry list of Harvard references. It becomes a readability issue when referencing is abused. For articles that require alot of references clearly end notes are preferable. However I have no problem with Harvard reference system either alone or with end notes. The problem I have with the references is the current format used for almost all the Y_DNA pages is not complete reference. They simply place first1= Author1 et al. and don't fill out the author list. You cannot convince me that this is an acceptable alternative referencing system. In the case of some of my complaint, they don't even provide PMID even though PMID is available, try finding some of these papers online with one author's name and no PMID or catalog source. I stand by my critic as an expert on these types of publications, that particular usage of Harvard referencing is unacceptable, anywhere.PB666 ^yap 00:48, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

the way to deal with references lacking PMIDs is to add them. arguments or reverts over reference format are rarely a good idea. If you do want to make major changes in that, then discuss it on the talk p first and get consensus. Some scientific journals still list first authors only. I agree its not ideal, but it';s not something to fight over. DGG ( talk ) 00:52, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Hundreds of references, you got to be kidding. Its actually worse that that, I showed Andrew how to capture references with PMID using the diberra template filler, which had been offline for months about the same time I came across the E1b1b page, which is easily converted to the citation style, with a couple of minutes of cutting in pasting in MSWord or Wordpad, you can have at least a four author, et al. reference. He acted as if i had committed high treason for suggesting that change. I went through the process step by step. He got very upset, I told him repeatedly that I was not suggesting he stop using Harvard referencing or the citation style, I was suggesting he improve the references, he got even more upset. Again even though I think the cite journal template is better I went out of my way to show him how to get complete citation template references quickly, and he got very upset. I don't think that is right. The tools are available, the process was explained, its not difficult, there was no reason for him to get angry. I have actually tried to use his references to find papers, and after failing I had to end up using a different search strategy. Referencing should suffice to find an article by modern methods, if it does not suffice then they should be improved. If I was truely interested in Y-DNA I would go about this process, but I am trying to be neutral in the assessment of how these articles improve, and I don't have the time to clean everyones dirty laundry. He needs to know how to improve these problems with these pages by himself, as it looks that no-one else is going to work for higher level improvements. I have done enough by showing him a quick and easy way how.PB666 ^yap 01:48, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

This is a timeline of what has happened. Sometime in late October an author by the name of Cardenas2008 created a page called R1a1a. After reviewing the complexities of the R1a page I concluded that a split was probably the best way to quickly improve the understandability. However Cardenas2008 had only copied and pasted the R1a page on R1a1a. As a result I rewrote the R1a1a page so that it reflected the R1a1a aspect of R1a only, and I moved materials off the R1a page. Andrew and MarmadukePercy got very upset.

Andrew, instead of requesting a merger, unilaterally blanked that page, removed my content, and reverted the R1a page. I allowed this to occur under the commitment that he was going to make the R1a page more suitable for a general audience. I had been wanting to go ahead with the improvement of that page for a week or so before, but he had us waiting for some unknown latest paper. Well he finally got the paper (from me) and so I said there is no reason to wait any longer, either you can make the page understandable with this new information, or it needs to be split. He did do that, he worked on rewriting various sections, however these new sections and many aspects were not following the Wikipedia guidelines. Finally he had improved the understandability of the page that a split was no longer necessary, IMO. There were still issues, it was a borderline B-class article and he continued to argue with me about things like what number of Harvard references in one sentence too much, what is the better style for authors in the Citation template, etc. So I simply nominated the article for GA review to see what outsiders might say needed improving.PB666 ^yap 00:02, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

So I requested he change the format on these sections while I worked on the figures and tables for the page. What happened instead was he began throwing up smoke, all kinds of diversionary tactics, all kinds of new remarks for me to respond to, eventually I said enough is enough. It became increasingly difficult for me to help him work toward a better page when I was getting a constant barrage of rhetorical questions which aligned themselves with a WP:OWN attitude. I was up until 4 AM trying to satisfy his critiques of the 'nomenclature' section when what I really wanted was for him to make the improvements. I commented on a bullet list that remained uncoverted, I waited a considerable amount of time for him to convert this to paragraph form, and when he did not I converted it. He promptly reverted my edits. In all of this, none the less, I have continued to try, maybe not succeed, but to push in the direction of trying to bring this article up to GA status, not only for that purpose, but also so these editors will have something to look at when improving the Y-DNA articles. I want this article to be reviewed by outside referees so that we can get some desperately needed outside input as what are the best recommendations for improving the Y-DNA pages, i am less concerned about getting every single factoid correct or writing the most perfect explanation (which is the focus of his complaints). Because it is quite obvious from observing and listening to editors that there is a lack of clarity about guidelines. I would also like to see the comments about what I have added, for my own sake. However, to just dump a dog's breakfast at their feet and say help us fix this would not be fair to them or us either. Andrew continues to use the 'you don't know diddly' issue, however most of the people have commented that what we have done, together, has improved the readability and understandability of the page, which means despite the complaints here, the page is progressing. Not in the way I would like to see it progress, but in a high-testosterone kind-of-way.PB666 ^yap 00:02, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Andrew will calm down after the comments come, and we see that we all have defects that need to be fixed. I have no problem with the critique myself, I think we need guidance looking forward because they way the project has been dealing with conflict in the past is not productive, IMHO.PB666 ^yap 00:02, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

As a user involved in this page over the past few months, I agree with Andrew Lancaster's assessment. Incidentally, Andrew and I haven't always agreed on things, but our dialogue has been civil, and we have worked together successfully. As soon as Pdeitiker appeared, the rules of the game seemed to change. Everything was personal; everything was a deadline; and every change became a slugfest. No matter what his genetics 'expertise' is – and I have reservations about that as he got backwards the most salient point concerning ancient Y-Dna in the Underhill paper – Pdeitiker seems to feel he can do it all. This despite the many comments on his user talk page from other editors complaining about his verbose writing style. My point is this: wikipedia editors have their strengths and weaknesses. The best editors here recognize those, and play to them. I know something about language – though Pdeitiker has insulted me on that score – and presumably he knows something about genetics. The best way for an article like this one to progress is for editors to respect each other's background. I have found this particular user high-handed, arrogant, and unwilling to listen. As Andrew Lancaster says, Pdeitiker seems to regard himself as the 'Bruce Lee' of genetics kung fu masters. He'd do better if he swallowed a dose of humility and came down off his high horse and deigned to work with others.That said, I am anxious for this article to be improved. I would like to go to work on improving its language, but fear that as soon as I do, 'Bruce Lee' will revert me. MarmadukePercy (talk) 01:46, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Please improve the language, I am only going to work on the lede, probably tonight, I will improve as far as I can and that will be it. OK, I will not revert your edits, if you want to look at my posting history I seldomly revert, I have never been cited by the 3RR and I generally always give people a chance to defend their reversion before I change them. I threaten to revert more often than I revert and I have kept my word about not splitting the article even though it was a violation of wikipolicy for Andrew to blank R1a1a page after major edits without calling for a merger. There are many areas such as the infobox, such as the bullet list in Eastern European migration section, such as the list of frequencies in the Second second that I have left untouched, there are many areas of the article that can and should be worked on and R1000R1000 and others have been making alot of edits, so why shouldn't you.PB666 ^yap 02:42, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

On the other issues, I have found myself immersed (more or less drafted by Andrew and Muntawandi) into wiki-war after wiki-war since July over terribly designed and written articles, and I am frankly tired of this. I have a 25 year perspective on the failures of Molecular Anthropology, and at the top of the list of marginal science are the Y-chromosomal studies. However Y-chromosomal studies are troubled, if you catch Andrew with the right timing he will say pretty much the same thing, the molecular clock is still greatly questioned, estimates range from 25 kya to 140 kya, and even if it worked NRY sequencing is rarely done, and comparative genetics is even more rarely done. And the STR dating that is used may be off by a factor of 3 fold. OK, so I have good reason to keep Andrews comments at a distance, why waste good thinking on bad data. The problem is that Andrew brings up the weaknesses of these approached when it is convenient for him but denies these issues when its not convenient. So again I keep his word at a distance. Caveot Emptor.

But for Wikipedia the problem is much worse, witness the last 3 months - there is alot, _and I mean alot_ of race-based promotion within HGH and including Y-DNA topics.

Here are some clear examples of riding over wiki-guidelines:

• Wiki-guidelines say clearly the long bullet lists are unwanted, and yet instead of building clades someone drops a long dirty laundry lists dressed as a cladograms into pages.
• Even when cladograms are made, such as in the R1b page they are not simplified and broken into understandable pieces instead they become a cobweb of confusion.
• Why are Y-DNA pages always involved in conflict, because editors are working to their own self-interested goals and not improvement of the encyclopedia.
• Why have I been asked to intervene in articles so poorly written that it is difficult to understand the core of the debate????PB666 ^yap 02:22, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

• I would encourage both of you to read wp:TLDR, wp:dispute resolution, and wp:five pillars. And that entire mess was TL, DR. I tried though. I did. I don't really see anything the admins need to do, here, though the TLDR thing might have just meant I missed it.- Sinneed 03:17, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

• YOu didn't this is more of an arbitration issue anyway. I refactored my comments, thanks. PB666 ^yap 04:34, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

The short version is that User:Pdeitiker is editing disruptively in order to make a WP:point. You only need to look at his own explanations of his intentions. This is NOT a content dispute as any glance at the diffs will show. Note that Deitiker gives no diffs above. His vague and confusing remarks are however clearly given in order to imply things. For example consider whether his vague accusations about my behavior match anything: I have not even edited R1a since Deitiker began his long threatened series of non-consensus edits. My bad behavior is just no agreeing with him. Unfortunately it seems that if you want to write disruptively on a scientific article all you need to do is make your talkpage postings long and confused, in order to put admins off.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:42, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

This is clearly another false statement, guys, right here he has made this statement in front of you and now you know what the problem is. Here is R1a page before I began trying to make the page more encyclopedic [164] and this is the page after my last edit, on the lead this evening[165]. This is a combination of both mine and Andrews work, I am not taking credit for it all, The cladograms, however 80%, 80% and 100% my work, the table, Andrews but I reformated, the other two tables are mine entirely. Many many edits in the distribution section culling out alot of unnecessary material. It is generally agreed in the talk pages that the page is much clearer and much easier to read now.

The core issue here is that I am pushing the interest and the goals of the encyclopedia and Andrew does not like this, he thinks that he, not wikipedia guides should be the major determinants about what goes on a page and what is improved. Just look at his favorite E1b1b page, read the last sections, those which I have never worked on. Is it encyclopedic, is it appropriate for a general purpose reader? Here within his last statement is the core of our dispute, its not about content, its about making it accessible. As per motive, Andrew told me one time that he does these pages as a reference for his own personal studies, I have no problem with that desire, but the key desire should be to make the pages suitable for a general purpose encyclopedia. And I thank Andrew for saying this, because if he hadn't disclosed the above I would have had to go hunt down diffs. You saved me the effort, the bias is quite clear, my improvements were constructive, just too encyclopedic for you. The reason Andrew is here guys is that he tried to elicit negative responses to my changes and everyone agreed so far that the page has improved, both with his and my changes. Without getting a clear green light from the editors of R1a, he got frustrated and came here, that is closer to the truth.PB666 ^yap 08:09, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Give diffs for accusations? --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:35, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

• I have not said that I do these pages as a reference for my personal studies. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:35, 24 November 2009 (UTC)
• As you and I both know there are only 3 editors who've commented on our disagreements, you, me, and User:MarmadukePercy. We form a consensus of 2, and you are the non-consensus writer. Such small numbers of editors is a frequent problem on specialized articles.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:35, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

• This is yet another false statement. Aside from the comments here these are two comments from the talk page comparing the two versions (Which Andrew has primarily reverted to his version, with some improvements)

It could look half as good as either version and still look supremely superior to Haplogroup R1b (Y-DNA). As far as this and that I favour as much explanation as possible for those learning, including long section titles for those who might be easily overwhelmed and need to keep going back to the top of the page.

— DinDraithou (talk) 23:12, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

I have to agree that there aren't any real substantive differences between the two version. Disagreements seem to be about presentation, prose and semantics. This paragraph appears to be more complex than it needs to be. Apart from the aforementioned paragraph, my initial impression is that both versions would be acceptable, especially when compared to typical wikipedia articles.

— Wapondaponda (talk) 17:40, 22 November 2009 (UTC)

Unsigned remarks and quotes inserted by PB666. I note that both these people studiously avoided expressing any opinion about your first round of recent edits over mine. They just expressed positive remarks that this article, which you keep describing in panicked terms as a load of unencylopedic crap, that has to be changed urgently or else, has been a lot better lately, and is a lot better than other haplogroup articles. They are also explicitly saying that this was already before you started changing it, although you have implied that I should probably be banned from Wikipedia for this work! [166]--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 14:03, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

• Example of your approach to listening to others: You proposed a draft; I commented as requested and you called me argumentative for doing this; then you inserted it with even the most obvious errors that had been pointed out still in place.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:35, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

• I don't think this level and hostility of tone desires a reply, anymore. It is clear that if you compared the last version of my lede (above) that the previous version that I felt it was a draft in style and layout, I did not treat it as a fixture on the page, and a recommended others to edit this and improve it. Every attempt to work with you became increasingly inappropriate and hostile, for that reason I started ignoring your comments, it was clear that you did not want your wording to change, the attitude was WP:OWN and the reversion essentially proved the point. I don't think I need to make any further comment here, if your desire is to continue the hostile commentaries then we need to move this on to Arbitration as I recommended. Your current version contains a large and reader unfriendly run-on sentence so I wonder why you are pointing out specific errors of mine? What type of adrenalin is bringing out your repeated hostility?PB666 ^yap 13:29, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Name an example of hostility of tone. You answer every concrete point with these emotional accusation, on the talkpages, and this is your constant pattern since I asked you not to try splitting the article until we had understanding of R1a itself: [167]. So it is much more simple than you make out: you are a disruptive editor, because you constantly fill talk pages with such accusations when people are trying to discuss edits. To treat constructive criticism as an attack, is itself potentially disruptive, and may result in warnings or even blocks if repeated. Concerning arbitration you've raised this many times and I've told you each time to put your money where your mouth is or else stop making these diversionary accusations. I am only asking for what Wikipedia policy normally demands. Answer good faith criticism rationally, and do not make accusations lightly.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:46, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Here is one, the most recent example of a great many: Regarding the evidence I put forward concerning the conversation between Andrew and Swin (quoted above) in an effort to create the most stable section names:

Why are you scared of moving this discussion to WP:HGH? If as you claim no one is reading it, then we'll see right?

— --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:47, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

This is pure and outright bullying, schoolyard level. Andrew is trying to drive this discussion off the page, because all of the evidence points to him having a problem with the wiki guidelines for stable section naming.PB666 ^yap 14:46, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

I just want to add, why am I keeping the discussion in R1a talk page here are the traffic statistics for R1a and here are the traffic statistics for [Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Human_Genetic_History], I previous brought my reasons to Andrew with statistics, and even so he continues to bully on the issue. To the best of my ability I have corrected page or answer his critiques with reasonable explanations, this response is very typical of his recent behavior.PB666 ^yap 15:28, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

OK, let's put this side subject (which is about a policy which affect many articles) aside. Please see my response here.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:01, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Genetic history of the British Isles is among the worst and most awesomely misinformative of all articles, in case anyone here is looking for one to smash up in their fury. Sorry for the interruption. DinDraithou (talk) 04:00, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Not an interruption - you prove my point, but the only article I want to 'smash up' on is the mtDNA Eve page, that is improve.PB666 ^yap 04:34, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Pdeitiker is a knowledgeable editor and many of his edits have definitely helped to improve wikipedia. However Pdeitiker uses an unconventional idiosyncratic editing style. This approach typically involves quite a bit of verbosity and an abundance of technical detail. It is possible that the use of technical detail may be to intimidate other users who may be less knowledgeable about the subject matter. A similar but unrelated dispute took place on several threads in Talk:Mitochondrial Eve, such as this section and this section.

The nature of the problem is not blatantly obvious since many of the articles are quite technical. I believe that Pdeitiker can be an even more effective contributor if he addresses the concerns that numerous editors have expressed about his editing. Wapondaponda (talk) 18:07, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

I am very well aware of this, the problem with the mtDNA page is that - when I came across the pages a couple of months ago, it was a disaster, many blatantly false statements and complete misrepresentation of the literature. It has lost its featured article status and probably would not have even qualified as a GA, certainly not from WP:HGH point of view. I asked people who were editing that page to go about repairing the damage, the answer was don't talk to us 'fix it yourself'. I am perhaps not the best person for the task because I have been following the up and down roller coaster of mtDNA since 1994, and I am all-too-aware about the problems in the popular literature, and the level of debate in the primary literature, particularly recently with regard to mutation rates and clock consistency. I have now added to that page the essense of what should be considered, a key point of the remake of the page were recent literature that reflected on topics misrepresented in the previous page (e.g. what are the limits of the TMRCA, what is the relationship of population size, and was or was not there a population bottleneck). It is going to be an extremely difficult task for me to bring out the quality of that page, particularly since there are 100s of papers that reflect on the topic, many of them recent. As I have finished the draft of that page one author within the field read the page and sent me more references, so I need to encorperate these other lines of thought. The issue for mtDNA and the TMRCA is a complicated issue, the primary reason is that as one approached the extant population by traversing higher branch points, the mutation rates go insane. At some point in the near future I want to bring this article up for GA review, due to its high importance, which means exactly-I need to get rid of the technical lingo without getting the page back to a ill-written 'popular science topic' page. Any specific aspect of the page you think can be improved I would be happy to have a critique of the technical lingo, this page really needs it.These new additions reflect also on the popular media, for example the Current "PBS NOVA: Becoming Human" series which talks about the evolution of humans in 'Oasis' in Southern Africa. PB666 ^yap 18:33, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

Having read the Y-chromosomal Adam pages, there are similar problems. This one should be easier for me since I have a more distal perspective.PB666 ^yap 18:33, 24 November 2009 (UTC)

I think these replies show the problem well, and my reason for posting here. In other words:

• On current trends more articles and their talk pages are headed towards the condition of Mitochondrial Eve, which is not good. Only a few Wikipedians so far have come into close contact with Pdeitiker and all apparently come to the same conclusions. But for the time being he feels quite justified in continuing as he has been doing. He has come to describe himself increasingly aggressively as representing the true aims of Wikipedia, improving the style and wording of these articles, and accusing others of using too much jargon and poor style. He also accuses others of unacceptable behavior on talkpages, in long postings that fill those talkpages. He reacts to words like "this is wrong" with accusations of personal attack and WP:OWN. But admins should look at what he has achieved at Mitochondrial Eve, and its talkpage.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:56, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
• Pdeitiker's verbosity and confused style, as in above response, might put people off, but is essentially his own personal talking to himself and trying to understand a subject and work out what he thinks, even when he is writing directly into the text of articles (or slightly less problematic, filling articles with invisible reminder notes). It is essentially textbook WP:OR.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:56, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

I feel that my accusation that OR underlies what PD666 generally describes as his "pushing the encyclopedias agenda" (see above). I will try to keep it short by saying that he admits that his opinions about what is good and bad in the literature is guiding this pushing. Remarks indicating this can be found peppered throughout all his talkpages discussions, but for example see above:

"I have a 25 year perspective on the failures of Molecular Anthropology, and at the top of the list of marginal science are the Y-chromosomal studies. However Y-chromosomal studies are troubled, if you catch Andrew with the right timing he will say pretty much the same thing, the molecular clock is still greatly questioned, estimates range from 25 kya to 140 kya, and even if it worked NRY sequencing is rarely done, and comparative genetics is even more rarely done. And the STR dating that is used may be off by a factor of 3 fold. OK, so I have good reason to keep Andrews comments at a distance, why waste good thinking on bad data." (PB666 on this page above)

So, I know it is confusing, but OR is playing a role in all this.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:32, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Has anyone else noticed how often content disputes involve subjects related to human genetics? This simply can't solely be due to its young, cutting-edge nature. (And I assume the vast majority of Wikipedians know better than to argue that one ethnic group is superior to any other.) For the record, I honestly expect half of the expert conclusions presently advocated will be found to be as plausible as Aether within the next 20 years. -- llywrch (talk) 19:09, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

You are right Llywrch, and I have bent over backwards to present all points of view on mtEve, even adding authors work, by their own request, that I have disagreements with. Andrew calls this OR, but what it actually is presenting the breath of confidence that many studies have pointed. And you are right, there are many, many battles in the human genetics area, and Andrew has been a major participant in those battles, particularly with regard to geneologies. Also correct that Wikipedia should not be the place to treat every speculation as a theory, and every theory as worthy.PB666 ^yap 19:51, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

My comment wasn't directed at only one specific person. And remember, it takes two to have a content dispute. -- llywrch (talk) 20:14, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

As Andrew has stated we are not having a content dispute, the dispute is how best bring forward wikipedia standards. I think A key problem, which aligns with what you said, regarding the R1a page (again a page I have only trying to help promote by the WP standards) is that originally there were four sections listed as different theories. Each promoted by their own sets of authors. Some of these had data that supported their points of view and some did not. In those original version support was given as per the popularity of the author and not the quality of the work or support. This is a problem with a great many pages in the HGH project. A person finds a paper with an author that supports their point of view, they then create a section in an article glorifying that persons point of view. And the next person comes along and does the same thing. I have been trying to reduce this 'glorification of pundits POVs' in these authors as a key step in ending the edit-warring and a key step in page improvements. Many folks who create these passages have no problem with an endless dirty laundry list of quotations, even though it denigrates the pages they have edited. This is why you have editors coming around asking for help cleaning up their pages. My point is, to Andrew, I cannot engage every battle, as some point those engaged in the battle need to put WP guides first other wise the pages will not improve, and the edit-warring will get worse because everyone wants their particular 'pundit-piece' highlighted relative to everyone elses.PB666 ^yap 20:36, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

The pattern described here by Llywrch is indeed real, and I think both PB666 and I would recognize it. However, I would say it is more general, and concerns many technical areas which arouse interest amongst non-specialists (Egyptians, Climate change etc). The problem happens at the interface so to speak. But, I think a very central part of it is that admins are scared off and do not have the time to investigate what are essentially the same types of editing problems that are found all over wikipedia. Actions named above in this case are simple violations of wiki policy of varying levels of importance, but amounting to a strong pattern (deleting or misleadingly refactoring talkpage entries of others, nominating an article in a dispute for GA review and announcing it as a way to make a point, studiously interpreting all disagreement as a personal attack, refusing to sign talkpage postings, demanding that other editors accept OR, stalking an editor and assigning him jobs with threats if he does not obey, etc). Let's be honest. These would be more swiftly dealt with one way or another if edit warriors in this field were not so good at writing scary walls of words. Just my two cents anyway. I guess it takes two sides for poorly functioning dispute resolutions also? Concerning your speculations about the future, yes, many of the positions pushed by edit warriors in this field will be like aether one day. That's why it would be preferable to identify them better. I do understand this is normally quite difficult. This case is different. Pdeitiker is not a myth pusher, and hopefully he won't accuse me of being one. He is useful editor. He makes nice graphics and tables. He is good when a really bad article needs pulling apart. He is probably just someone who needs admins to explain the rules. Right now he has lots of experience editing obscure articles without contention and he feels that he can now start a program of changing all kinds of articles. This should be a simpler case than most which come up concerning genetics articles. Someone explain the rules at the very least? Let me explain it another way. Here is the article I have been working on, which PB666 has said is so "disturbingly" un-encyclopedic that I should be banned, and here is an article he got to have his run at: Mitochondrial Eve. I think some perspective would do a great deal. A quick peek at the facts and a few words might be enough. Stranger things have happened.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 20:49, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Wall of words, like the above? WP:TLDR. Show me where I said you should be banned. What I did was compare your actions to two individuals that were banned, and indicated that you were acting like them. Aside from that you have made 2 major reversions, first on the R1a1a page and then on my correction of your bullet list that were not reflective of Wikipedias process of concensus building. First R1a1a blanking should have been preceded by a Merger request, particularly since the person who was working on the page and the person who created and filled the page were different editors. The second reversion you made went against the Wikipedia guideline "Do not use lists if a passage reads easily using plain paragraphs.", I asked you to at least correct the part that was reverted and you began arguing about how your ideas about the article were more important that WP:Guidelines. As I was trying to get you to comply you began accusing me of making false accusations and then making false accusations. It is as simple as that. I should note that I did not revert your edits, instead I worked with what you wrote working with the WP guidelines for editors. PB666 ^yap 22:06, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

Insulting behavior of Andrew_Lancaster continues

See [168] Again, I am trying to help the improvement of the article, many critiques are being retorted with a bad faith criticism. Andrew has now ventured out and begun trying to create edit wars regarding other pages, and even criticize me for leaving a broad range of critiques on the articles GA1 review page, which I proposed. I do not think that Andrew_Lancaster is working to back off his insulting behaviors. He has even accused me of attempting to 'game' the GA process. I assure everyone here that I am reviewing the article in good faith, inserting critiques that I think are weaknesses, and I am not trying to undermine the article or Wikipedia. And would like everyone to note that I engaged the GA process to draft comments and critiques into an area where this type of edit warring greatly preceded me. I feel as if I am being attacked for trying to make these pages more encyclopedic, attacks which suggest that some individuals would prefer to block making these pages more encyclopedic.PB666 ^yap 19:51, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

These are the comments that I left on the R1a's talk page:Talk:Haplogroup_R1a_(Y-DNA)/Comments. Am I trying to game the GA process? Or find ways to improve the page?PB666 ^yap 19:56, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

The second ANI case

R1a talkpage turning into one persons blog opinionating about problems in genetics literature "generally"

The Talk:Haplogroup R1a (Y-DNA) page itself is the best evidence of what the headers says. I was criticized for long postings on earlier attempts to get help on this problem. It has since developed further. I think the following diffs are plenty. They are simply the several edits made so far by User:Pdeitiker to create the current version of his latest creation on that talkpage: [169], [170], [171], [172], [173], [174]. Although I have written a response and tried to treat it as if there is a discussion going on [175], past form shows that this user will probably continue editing what he has written, partly in order to make the response look wrong. If this is not disruptive editing, what is? Genetics articles with popular interest are hard enough at the best of times to get balanced.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:46, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Hurrgghhh. This is a clear series of WP:TALK violations. Anti-Kurgan-hypothesis ranting has a long and ignoble history, from the Hindutva fanboys at Out of India theory (who want the PIE urheimat to be India), to Rokus01 (talk · contribs), who, from memory, wanted it to be in the Netherlands. Some unholy alliances resulted. No one is denying the theory has its problems: at the same time, it is the most widely accepted and fluent explanation available: certainly "academic mainstream". Where this guy is coming from is not clear but he's certainly not offering anything constructive. Thoughts on what to do? Moreschi (talk) 12:11, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Moreschi asks about the background to "this guy". Examination of the talk page will show that this is not the only blog-like subject taking up space there, and heading towards OR, SYNTH, etc. User:Pdeitiker's background is in genetics, and he has explained his interest here as being trying to show that a genetics article can be brought up to GA level. Articles he works on such as Mitochondrial Eve have been heavily criticised for jargon. Therefore he became interested R1a while it was recently being brought from a very poor standard to a much better standard (according to all other editors following this article). Therefore, the basic theme of most of his digressions is to try to argue that the article is actually "crap", despite what everyone thinks, and needs his urgent large-scale re-writing. I have tried to keep this short.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:28, 28 November 2009 (UTC)::

Oww, my eyes. My gut reaction? User:Pdeitiker and you could both use a day off. The text blob there (247k!) is just so huge that, though you diffs are entirely reasonable, it would take hours to pick out counterpoints or anything close to neutral out of it. Looks to be mostly rambling to try to take the last poke at a hideous pile of horse meat, and you both likely are looking at it as gaming or an attempt at mass POV pushing via the bulk posts. This is going to look like the cheap way out of giving an answer, but since you're about to tear your hair out, just message the other user and admit that it's not worth the stress and you think a weekend away would be helpful. Oh, and don't take the bait on anything, jeesh. Reading some lines of your user talk page comments looked like a game of macho intellectual thumb-biting on the hope that maybe one of you will go way out of line on more direct civility somewhere. Try to think of it that way. Don't let someone trick you into doing or saying something extremely dumb when you're confident policy and guidelines are with you. Nothing is looking terribly productive.

For simplicity on what would probably be a result of looking over chat, just say everyone has had a ... "frustrated tone" to this point? Look back, relax, talk through and get multiple opinions from the other editors of where consensus stands so there's a starting point to work off of. Those in opposition might not end up caring, but it does matter if there have been discussions done on what a current status is so that it's easier to see where disruption is from. Consider this your first advice on backlash and dispute resolution that people like to draw out for no reason; don't shop forums or specifically write to any editors about it, even if it's just to get a starting consensus. WP:RC. Crafty disruptive editors will spot all of it and gladly post a list of diffs a mile long about how you'd trying to pile-on. ♪ daTheisen(talk) 13:21, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

The record shows that I have tried leaving the article, and that Pdeitiker did as he says he will. Pdeitiker's stated aim is to treat what has been achieved there recently as crap and re-write it. In the words of another editor: "Left to his own devices, Pdeitiker would convert this article into Einstein's theory of general relativity as he has done with Mitochondrial Eve"[176]--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:28, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

BTW I know what you mean about "crafty disruptive editors" and I know at first sight it might look like such a case. But it is not. Pdeitiker really seems to have confused himself about what Wikipedia rules are, and in this state he has shown now several times that he will make major unilateral changes to the article when given a chance. I am concerned not to let that happen. Other editors have expressed a quite clear consensus that recent editing direction has been a major improvement. This article was an edit war minefield for a long time. We should really try to avoid a bull in a china shop messing that up.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:32, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

I am not totally convinced. Should the page be about the gene flow only, or should it give a general discussion on the spread of languages and cultures? They do not necessarily correlate close with genotype. DGG ( talk ) 19:48, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

I do not think we can seriously propose that Wikipedia can treat the whole enormous field of interdisciplinary speculation (linguistic, genetic, archaeological) about ancient population movements as "fringe"? If the literature is full of it, in all three fields, and it is notable and mainstream, what are the options? Pdeitiker's proposal is clear: we make our own judgments. Let me by the way point out that the subject of "ancient population movements" is touchy. There is always some group or another watching for any slight sign of bias against, Albanians, Serbs, Turks, Indians, Africans, whatever. These articles are increasingly being read by a wider public. But I have now managed to damp down massive edit warring in two articles like this, E1b1b and R1a by compromising and trying to see the good in all sides, and I know that Deitiker's approach is simply not possible or desirable, and that Wikipedia's guidelines actually work: let every reasonable opinion be mentioned, in context, with alternatives mentioned, etc etc. WP:UNDUE. Please also do not forget the reality of the context: the problems of the Kurgan hypothesis have only now been raised after a new editor mentioned them, and good on him, this section does need work. For Deitiker this is only the latest in quite a number of desperate attempts to argue that the article is "crap" and "disturbingly badly" written, and people need to start giving way to Deitiker "or else" because only he knows how to make the article "encyclopedic". (The quotes are real. Diffs available.) Strange thing is that he also openly says that his interest in the article is because it has been brought to a relatively good level for a Y haplogroup article, and he wants (he literally says) to try to be part of getting it to GA level, both as an example to other Wikipedians, and also and in particular to put me personally through a "painful" experience of "self improvement". Just read the talk page. I have seriously tossed up making a case for Wiki-hounding.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 20:42, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Just to make one thing clear before admins switch off: yes, the whole enormous field of interdisciplinary speculation (linguistic, genetic, archaeological) about ancient population movements is very speculative. Nearly everyone who complains about how speculative it is really has a valid point. But this valid point helps no one when it comes to deciding how to edit on Wikipedia. It is simply a challenge to be solved without too much wikidrama if possible. If we have massive and obvious violations of wikipedia talkpage violations this job becomes quite difficult.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 20:54, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

I do not see the primary problem as talk page violations, but rather Ownership. He is not the only person to have expressed this attitude, but his attitude towards this is indeed quite extreme, and does seem to need some considerable adjustment. DGG ( talk ) 21:03, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure why you make the insinuation about WP:OWN. I've tried stopping editing, and that did not work. We've had other editors agree with me and get hounded off the page [177], or asked to post elsewhere [178], etc. The guy seriously will make the page more like Mitochondrial Eve. If saying that this is not good is "biased" then OK, I'm biased. But I think you can not have looked at Mitochondrial Eve and its record then. It is chalk and cheese. Sometimes saying one article is better than another is not biased.

Simple enforcement of wikipedia talkpage guidelines, or even just a couple of people saying what they are in particular real cases, would probably do a lot. In some ways this is a weird case. In some ways it really is a no brainer. One basic point is that while Pdeitiker thinks he can say things like "you are not arguing me, but with Wikipedia" over something like for example, bullet points, or the number of paragraphs in the lead; while he thinks he can review the article and then cite himself in third person as a critic, or call for a GA review during a content debate, and then tell everyone he just did so in order to ensure they give way and work to a deadline, thinks he can rewrite his posts after replied to or even edit replies, etc etc etc...--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:50, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

• WP:TLDR Obviously there are deeper issues here. I will answer one critique from DGG. Language and genes do not often flow together. For example the Irish speak and IE tongue but are genetically more closer to the Basque than they are to any anatolians. There is neither a cultural, linguistic, metal age or any other cultural association with the genetics. It is quite common examining HLA haplotypes to find finger print haplotypes shared by two different peoples that have no known historical or paleocultural link what-so-ever other than common Eurasian origins. It is also not too uncommon to see papers show certain links, which are soon followed by archaeological studies that support those links. I have a nose for speculation, and that material that has been on this page for quite some time reeks of speculation. The bottom line, and Andrew will probably agree with this, using either shallow SNPs (surface phylogenetic variation) or STR diversity (the clocking of which is highly questionable) the range of migrations times from or to Eastern Europe extends over 1000s of years. The problem is the the Kurgan culture existed for only 1500 years, and the bigger problem is that cultural flow from eastern Europe into other parts of Europe have been suggested in many studies. Here are two studies that go into great deal about the late paleolithic Mesolithic and Early Neolithic and are online.

• Late Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Early Neolithic in Lower Alpine Reoing between the Riveris Iller and Lech (South West Bavaria).-Birgit gehlen
• Review- Final Paloelithic and Mesolithic Research in a Unified Germany- Street et al., Journal of world prehistory:15 (4) 2001
• An example of Gene-Language study gone wrong: The correlation between Languages and genes:The Usko-Mediterranean peoples. Human Immunology 62:1052-1061 (2001).

As per Andrew_Lancaster and his clearly WP:OWN attitude concerning my edits to the page. Eventually you will need to deal with this issue in Arbitration. Final comments on this page, yall have fun.PB666 ^yap 22:11, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

daTheisen, you hit the nail on the Head, I purposefully took a timeout yesterday to do some gardening, just as today. I got a Biskmark palm waiting outside to be planted. The problem, Andrew is like the guy at the hotdog stand that elbows you in the gut whenever you try to Make an order, or look at what's available, he's got major Own Issues. He took up most of my morning yesterday because he, although he says I known nothing about Y-DNA stuff, did not apparently understand the difference between a Haplogroup and a Haplotype or Patrilineality. He finally did figure it out, but he really botched up the lead sentence in the Article and everytime I replace that lead paragraph with my version he reverts it, no matter how poorly matched his material is or no matter it if follows the wikiguidelines or not. He just elbows me in the gut.PB666 ^yap 22:25, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

PD, honestly, your guesses about my intentions and opinions are so amazingly wrong sometimes, even when I think they are perfectly clear to everyone else. For example your whole story about us arguing about a term, and me finally understanding, is nonsense. We simply never discussed it in any two way conversation. I simply said it was irrelevant, and you were not looking at the wording being proposed but just off writing on another tangent. I still say it is irrelevant. All these events in the discussion which you remember never happened. They were between the lines for you and you alone. Anyone reading the talk page will not see them. I can say exactly the same thing about how you recall all the debates you think you've had since you tried to split the article a few weeks back and then got nasty because no one liked it. You've come up with all kinds of theories about why no one agreed, all except the reasons that people clearly explained to you. I do not know how to try harder than I have to communicate with you.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:39, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

The RfC on OR

My initial submission after the case was opened by User:Muntuwandi

I have been busy on the R1a article and more generally in WP:HGH and I definitely share Wapondaponda's concerns. There is no doubt that PB666 has a lot of original, unorthodox and interesting thoughts to share somewhere else, but we can ignore all his long explanations about those ideas here because demanding that these ideas be taken into account on Wikipedia articles is very clearly WP:OR. And trying to disrupt editing in order to make a point about is also. He knows this, and he clearly feels no problem in simply demanding that it is justified. Indeed it has to be said that he has some sort of enormous emotional hang up about trying to make an impact upon the relatively popular haplogroup articles, which are often being edited by people without his "25 years experience". Some diffs which make his position on this pretty clear:-

• [179]
• [180]. (In this example PB666 says that I should not be calling his TALKPAGE critiques of the literature irrelevant to Wikiedpia, and as an explanation, he compares it to a case where someone sent him an article he had not read, and he change Wikipedia on that basis.
• "Without any other facts, based on 10,000s of edits here on a wide variety of pages, I conclude that I have the better representation of reality. Therefore I am going to be disgruntled and gripe about the issue as I prepare mentally before going through 100 poorly written pages based on awful molecular anthropology to fix an issue of carelessness. If someone out there doesn't want me (self-admitted Y-DNA skeptic) doing resectioning of their precious Y-DNA pages I suggest they take the initiative." [181]
• [182]
• [183]

PB666 clearly has developed something like an obsession with reforming the field from a platform from within Wikipedia. His edits on R1a especially the talkpage, where he now regularly posts essays of up to 20,000 bytes, are clearly disruptive by any normal definition.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 17:00, 6 December 2009 (UTC) I think as an example of the disruptive talkpage editing this is being used to justify, I should give two examples which show two types of problem, one which shows how this is becoming a classic case of disruptive editing [184], and one to show the peculiar aspect of publishing OR on talkpages and refusing to explain relevance [185].--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 17:19, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Comments I posted [186] on the talk page of admin User:Dougweller

Hi Doug. Can you have a look at a potential problem? I do not know if you'd be aware of it, but R1a has been the subject of a lot of work, mostly positive I think, and then recently two new articles arrived in the literature, which made the editing job a bit confusing, and this seems to have annoyed one editor. A situation has arisen now because User:Pdeitiker first proposed, and then made [187], a massive change to the article, trying to distinguish R1a's rare siblings into a separate article from the most common clade within R1a, which is what most authors mean by "R1a". He also bizarrely moved all recent discussion on R1a to the talkpage of the secondary article [188]. He asked for opinions, and received disagreement [189], [190], which he apparently ignored. After looking at the result of the splits, and realizing that neither of the two articles were in a coherent state, and that the talkpages had become useless, alarm bells were rung [191], [192]. His responses are obviously in bad faith, because when they were responded to he changed the excuses. What it now clearly comes down to is that we should not just be blindly accepting what is published. I then later reversed this split, also trying to answer at least some of his concerns, and also returned material back to the original talk page. This has resulted in repeated demands now that other Wikipedians have until Saturday to appease Pdeitiker, or else he'll revert to his split versions. The main threads of talkpage discussion are here: [193], [194], [195], [196], [197]. This User is a good faith editor, who does normally like wikilawyering or anything like that, and I would like this to calm down and get practical, but I thought it worth mentioning because some of the comments are getting silly.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:54, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I suggest further observation. The talkpage tone and the main page editing are getting uncivil in a very childish way. Other editors are starting to disappear. My attempts to communicate are now being constantly met with the old school boy trick of avoiding response with "you are upset because..." answers [198]. PB666 is threatening to keep reverting one section I've mentioned as being in error, unless I work on other things instead. [199]--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:04, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

"The critical error in these works which you fail to place on the page is that they have not done true sequence comparisons between clades, for example R1a1a* and any R1b*. That is part of explaining why there is differences to the layman. Since you don't want to do that I created a cladogram that implies that is what is going on."[200]--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:51, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

The problem here is that PB666 feels it is unquestionable that people should defer to him on everything including writing style, but his editing is terrible. How do you tell someone that without being "personal"? Discussion has become very blocked:- "I repeat this, you are not going to get me to back off on pushing the readability aspects of the article, I am doing this for your own improvement such that in future you can do this with Y-DNA pages by yourself. I have had the almost same discussions with older editors (3 years back) that you are having with me now." [201]--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 06:50, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Take a look at WP:DRV, see if there is anything there you thin you can use. Dougweller (talk) 07:07, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Not sure I see the relevance. The article split proposal might have been a trigger for worse communication but it is not being disputed anymore.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 16:40, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Is there a WP policy on people who think they are kung fu masters putting apprentices through hoops in order to make them stronger? :) See, just for examples from today--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 23:15, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

• The page will not self-improve if you also do not self-improve. [202]
• Again, this should be your baby, and there are about 6 days left before GA occurs, if by that time we haven't gotten around the basic issues of style and working, then I might replace the sections. However I would hope that you will take the initiative at this point, looking at other GA articles and these edits go about making the repairs yourself. I will focus on the lede, henceforth.[203]

I would like admin opinion on at least a couple of issues:

• Very intensive use of hidden notes expressing personal opinions within the main text of the article. I have been removing many of them.
• A big point is being made about the fact that Wikipedia demands that the lede must be bigger than what we have right now. PD is insistent that we are therefore forced to insert material there which largely duplicates material in the main body.
• The assigning of deadlines, as in the diff mentioned above. (For the two other questions any look at the article and talkpages involved should show you what I mean fairly quickly.)

Regards--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:40, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Doug, I believe that the ONLY discussions on the R1a talkpage right now are about interpretation of Wikipedia norms, both in terms of editing and also acceptable talkpage behavior. I can't seem to break out of that. We really need some outside input on these things at least. It seems everything I propose or do is being described as being in violation of PB666's interpretation of some rule somewhere, with no discussion possible. And indeed I'd say most of his postings currently really are in violation of the spirit and letter of Wikipedia, but maybe I'm crazy. (The long long postings of PB666 are largely devoid of relevance to anything, but I can understand how they make Wikipedians feel unqualified to comment.)--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:15, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

Doug, a familiar sounding user just appeared at the R1a talkpage, User:HonestopL. Looks like Cyrus?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 20:05, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Jog my memory please - maybe a link to Cyrus's contributions? Dougweller (talk) 20:18, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

Apologies, I meant User:Cosmos416.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 20:36, 30 November 2009 (UTC)

PDeitiker is becoming more of a man on a mission out to make a point now: [204] then to this [205]. His attempt to call for GA review as way to apply pressure during silly content disputes blew up in his face [206], as it had to, and this has led to an increase in problems. What his real point is, is difficult to define. The nominal target keeps changing.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 15:47, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm just left with a headache. I know I hate infoboxes. I really just don't understand the subject well enough to know what this is all about. If it were archaeology or history, sure, but genetics? Sorr. Dougweller (talk) 16:53, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

:) the reading I just gave you will be sure to make you feel more positive right? --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:26, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

I believe these cases should be easier to follow for you: [207], [208]--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:58, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

I am trying to think how I can avoid having to respond to the accusations and distortions. I was wondering what the feeling is about simply deleting pointlessly long or pointlessly argumentative posts if they keep coming and the disruption is obvious? (I imagine that if you asked people to name which ones come under this category on the R1a page there would be little disagreement about some of them.) My first impression is that this will not be accepted by the community?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 13:29, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

You're right. Please don't delete them. And with respect, language such as 'fantasy accusations', right or wrong, doesn't help your case, especially if you go for a RfC on him (which would need someone else such as Marmaduke Percy). Dougweller (talk) 14:07, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

I have gone to ANI twice. Language such as "fantasy accusations" is about as far as I go, compared to the increasingly hateful and obviously deliberately disruptive language of PB666. If anything though, it seems to work for him like a magic "wall of invisibility" keeping admins away from him. He cites the ANI cases now as being on his side! And who is going to bother to look things up? So far this morning he has expounded almost 20,000 bytes worth on the R1a talk page. He is openly gloating over his power to disrupt now, and it is aimed largely at me personally: "The thing is here, I am the one person he can't deal with".--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 07:58, 4 December 2009 (UTC)

I would like an admin opinion about this usage of the comments option on the R1a article: [209]. The record shows that PB666 is using such comments, and also making reviews about the quality of articles he is working on and/or disputing about. He then refers to reviews during disputes as if they were done by someone else, and more generally he quite frequently writes during disputes as if "people are watching". I have raised it with him on the talk page [210], and he has now reduced the size of these particular remarks but they seem to be things that should just be worked on either on the talkpage or else by simply trying to find better wordings etc. He quite openly objects to the idea that people should be able to post their reasons for disagreeing with the comments. When I tried to open discussion on the talkpage [211] he accused me of "getting all peeved about the 3 remaining comments, and then going biserk" and "carrying on the war ... working his Maelstorm" [212]. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 19:52, 6 December 2009 (UTC)