User talk:LokiTheLiar

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Just thought you deserved some positive feedback

Loki, I just wanted to let you know that I appreciate the efforts you are making to find common ground on the Rowling article. The area of discussion is certainly one where editors have trouble finding a midpoint but you are clearly making that effort. Springee (talk) 14:02, 15 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! You too, FWIW. Loki (talk) 14:34, 15 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's been a month and I'm going to reiterate what I said above more generally (not just at the Rowling article).

		The Original Barnstar
		For being fair and civil even in the face of talk page disagreements. Springee (talk) 21:43, 23 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm Red!

Aren't I? And my user and talk page? 🤔 Tewdar 08:14, 12 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Along with a whole bunch of other users... at least, on my system. Tewdar 08:15, 12 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I was pretty sure you weren't? It's very uncommon for me to stumble on an editor that it marks as anything.

The reference to infighting in the original thread makes me suspect there might be some kind of fork situation. Loki (talk) 18:01, 12 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Well , I'm red in the firefox extension on my computer and mobile, along with others like sweet6970, barnardz.tar, void... Tewdar 19:43, 12 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Let me show you why I think this

I think you're conflating Chess's (partly legitimate) issues with Cole with what Chess is doing on the talk. Let me provide some more context about why I say what I say. Firstly, read his arguments in the talk archive. Then, compare what you say in your opening statement with Chess's comments at Wikipedia_talk:No_personal_attacks/Archive_14#Adding_spirituality_as_a_group_of_people_that_shouldn't_be_targeted_by_personal_attacks. Then, see this exchange at the Signpost talk. Then, see this Signpost exchange, and this comment too. Then, read Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor, which Chess wrote. Then, see the failed DYK on the talk page. Then, read Meters' comments there. Then, note when that article was lasted edited. There is more I can say, but I think you get the idea. Chess being "wrong" or a contrarian isn't the problem. It's what he says, it's how he moves.

Now, take what I said and what you said at AE. This is all lining up with someone who is not taking this as seriously as either of us are. I appreciate your defense here, but this is all just elaborate trolling. This behavior has no place here.

Btw, you have email. Moneytrees🏝️(Talk) 04:29, 15 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I mean, you've convinced me that Chess has been waging something like the "saying stuff is FRINGE is just a way to POV push" crusade he's currently on in GENSEX for years across multiple topic areas. If that's what you were trying to argue, congrats, but I feel like it wasn't. Loki (talk) 05:42, 15 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I'm not really actually thinking about FRINGE here. Admittedly what I'm getting at is hard to completely connect together. Let me detail my thoughts here further:

Chess's comments at The Signpost provide context to his beliefs; I don't necessarily have an issue with the comments themselves. Quite honestly I don't care about Singpost hot takes unless they become a lightning rod for more drama.

The September 2021 comment is a satirical one where he criticizes San Francisco-based non-profit "woke ideologies" that have a narrow view of ""fixing"" global issues (See Indy beetle's comment).
The key part of the 2022 Wikied issues comment is where Chess says "It's the overwhelmingly decline in academic standards at many North American universities and in academia as a whole. Credentialism and an overemphasis on university degrees has meant that a 4 year program is the minimum to get a wide variety of jobs. Standards are lower now to accomodate this and universities focus not on training students to critically think/evaluate sources, but on learning how to write cookie cutter essays in Grievance studies or wherever else."
The key parts of the comment at Tamzin's 2024 op-ed are "To truly decolonize Wikipedia, we need to retreat from our core content policies that characterize personal knowledge as inferior to dispassionate secondary sources which summarize them. Instead, we would have to acknowledge that indigenous editors fundamentally are more qualified to edit on indigenous topics than settlers, and understand that their lived experiences are more valuable than Western scholarship." But of course, Chess doesn't actually agree with this; "...As this becomes more prevalent in academia (e.g. how Dr. Keeler believes that his personal involvement does not make him less reliable), we're going to have to decide what to do with journals that don't exert editorial control or do fact-checking because they believe knowledge comes from personal relationships instead of scientific theory."

From this, we can gather that Chess has a negative view of modern academia, post-Colonialism related studies, Postmodernism, Western-informed "woke" efforts, and the like. There's nothing really wrong with feeling this way or expressing such opinions; I would guess I have some overlap with Chess on this, actually. But the problem then comes with trying to promote these views across Wikipedia in a backhanded way; this leads to the two other examples I cite.

The 2021 NPA discussion Chess starts proposes "spiritual beliefs" be added to a sort of list of groups personal attacks could be made against. Chess indicates that he's proposing this with "indigenous spirituality". This is not necessarily an incompatible belief with his above expressed opinions, but his comments in that discussion very fall in line with the on-the-nose "proposing stuff I don't agree with to prove a point" discussions detailed throughout the AE.
This leads to the 2025 creation of Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor, which Chess attempted to get on the front page through DYK. Read through the article before it was edited by others and Chess made changes after issues were raised in the DYK review; in particular, note the Israel-Palestine section; (The paper itself received mainstream attention after the October 7 attacks on Israel due to academics and students using the term "decolonization is not a metaphor" as a slogan when supporting the attacks.) and the quote. The quote is now gone, and the section has been reworded since. Now, knowing what we know about Chess's opinions, his intent in creating the article seems to be to promote a sort of cynical anti-academic POV, and promote it via the main page. This is an example of his view and trolling tactics seeping into the mainspace. This is further substantiated by the discussions on the talk page; 4meter4 details several issues with the article, and Chess himself indicates he has had trouble parsing the sources and creating the article. That's ok, it's a difficult subject to write about and summarize; but if you do not have a very good understanding of a controversial subject, it is best to not write about it. This goes back to my comments about Chess caring more about culture wars and scoring points than compromises and discussions; the crux of his version of the article appears to be linking the paper to terrorism (sourced to op eds) than accurately discussing the paper and its detractors/praise. Again, he can hold his own opinions on these topics; the problem is when it's shoved into mainspace in a manipulative manner and wastes the time of other editors. Chess has apparently seen the writing on the wall wrt that article and has not edited it since the DYK review.

So yes, that is some more context to why I do not take his points about DEADNAME seriously, and why I think this brand of trolling is particularily intractable and problematic. But, reasonable minds may disagree. I think this is much much worse than "Civil POV pushing" or whatever. Moneytrees🏝️(Talk) 02:09, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with your opinion on Chess's skeptical views on academia and academic "wokeness", I think that's very consistent with his stated opinions on FRINGE in GENSEX.

I don't really think that implies that he would have to think that it's bad or wrong to protect spiritual beliefs separately from religious ones, and despite the failure of the thread it just doesn't feel like a subject susceptible to trolling. Like, what would he even be mocking here?

I agree that DYK entry was a POV-pushing attempt, though I think I disagree with you in that I think it's a very forthright one and not an example of WP:POINT or an attempt to troll. Chess very clearly thinks the subject of that article is bad and that saying that Palestinian activists like it tends to make them look bad. I don't think that he was attempting to hide that, his wording was very clearly biased to the point of stretching the sources. (Which is bad, don't get me wrong.) Loki (talk) 03:10, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In both cases, Chess’s stated reason is not what I’m focusing on. I am focusing on his intent, in the context of what we know about him. The comment I cite in the NPA discussion is a tip off to the question not being asked in good faith. Chess does not appear to take these indigenous related topics as seriously as he indicates there. Regardless, I will concede it is not as key as my other evidence.

As for the Decolonization article, well; when I see someone create an article, I assume good faith, and that it is properly sourced and written, and it is not being written to further one’s POV. I think that expectation applies to all articles, especially ones that are nominated for DYK. I subscribe to the belief that content on the main page needs to have a particular high quality. So I see the edits there as an inherit betrayal of that good faith. Maybe it does not neatly fall into the examples outlined at POINT, but it is most certainly “disrupting Wikipedia” to prove a point. This is a serious case about someone not taking things seriously, to the damage of everyone else.

Past all of that, though; are you concerned that a sanction here will make sanctioning “Civil POV pushers” more difficult? I don’t think this precludes sanctions against that group; I think this is just a different and more complex version of that. If that is a concern of yours, I hope I’ve assuaged it. Moneytrees🏝️(Talk) 04:32, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's not that I think that a sanction here will do anything to how severe sanctions to civil POV pushers will be. It's that I think that civil POV-pushing is in the long run much more damaging than WP:POINTy or WP:SPIDERMANy behavior, and so I'm frustrated that everyone is taking this report deadly seriously while reports of civil POV-pushers in the same topic area are basically ignored.

Chess's weird WP:POINTy thread wasted about a day of the time of the regulars at FTN. Chess alone has easily wasted more time than that by repeatedly arguing that FRINGE sources are not FRINGE, and he's not the worst offender by a long shot. Essentially all of GENSEX editing involves some kind of long demoralizing pointless argument that carries on longer than Chess's thread did, and nobody ever gets sanctioned for any of it.

Chess's weird WP:POINTy thread had essentially no chance of changing how Wikipedia actually covers the Republican Party. But civil POV pushers regularly do change how Wikipedia covers LGBT issues for the worse. We couldn't even agree that WPATH, the major WP:MEDORG in the field, was in fact a major WP:MEDORG and that broad-spectrum criticism of everything it does probably was quackery, and largely because a bunch of editors known for such broad-spectrum criticism (admittedly, including Chess) made arguments that basically amounted to "that can't be quackery because I agree with it". In fact one of the editors who argued that WPATH was unreliable was held up by multiple admins at AE as a paragon of neutrality as they failed to agree on a sanction.

Basically I think Chess's behavior in this instance was especially dumb and disrespectful but that's really all it was. If we had a better track record of sanctioning for actual disruption to the encyclopedia I would have made a different argument, and under that circumstance I probably would support strong sanctions. But nothing anyone's brought up so far is something that I think is actually that damaging, and nothing I think is actually damaging would be something AE would agree to sanction. Loki (talk) 05:42, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for expanding on your thought process here, Loki; it helps me understand you position a lot more. Truthfully, I've experienced a similar frustration a lot. When I was on Arbcom, CT cases that would reach us often had a moment where it felt like something slipped through the cracks at the wrong time, or an admin felt held back by politics, or a dispute became so verbose that third parties were alienated. A sanction would have probably been the best course of action, but because of these various factors, the dispute would just get bigger and bigger and more and more of a time sink. You can't help the feeling-- "oh, if they only knew about X and Y, maybe things would be different...!" It was something that dulled my spirits after drafting AA3... that kind of came to a head with the sanctions that came out of ARBPIA5; that case brought out sanctions for conduct that has previously gotten less traction at AE. I talked about [[this at my Smallcats case votes; sometimes, it is easier to act on the "obviously" bad conduct, even when it may not be as consequential as more "civil" conduct, as you say. Which leaves me with a question; as you say, Chess has additionally engaged in this civil POV pushing, even if it is not the crux of my evidence against him. If you think that is more serious than the evidence I present... then why only ask for a warning?

I allude to some of this in my statement at ARC; "additionally, there is some evidence that only Arbcom is aware of concerning some of the parties here, which has somewhat stymied on-wiki action being taken towards these editors; I'll elaborate on this through an email." I was directly thinking of some AE reports when I said this, actually; had some information been public, the results may have been different. In this era of Wikipedia, offsite canvassing/coordination and subsequent sneaky POV-pushing are unfortunately becoming more and more the paradigm in CTs. It's been frustrating dealing with this stuff as an admin/functionary, as our processes have not completely adjusted to dealing with it yet (see all of the offsite antics and canvassing around AA3 or ARBPIA5, for example). It's something I want to try and address when the current case gets opened. I've tried to do my part behind-the-scenes and with my work at the COIVRT.

This feeds into why I'm taking this case so serious. Chess's contributions-- whether it is civil POV-pushing or outright trolling-- still cause damage, whether it is drowning out legitimate discussion with faux-arguments and proposals, or the sort of civil-POV pushing you discuss. Both can hurt, whether it is Lourdes trolling fraught discussions to cause drama or POINTy proposals against ideological enemies. When an editors' good faith is caused into question-- and it becomes evident that their contributions to both mainspace and project space are constructed to promote their views-- that requires their contributions, both in article space and discussion, to be looked over with a fine-toothed comb, much like that of an editor blocked for copyright violations or undisclosed COIs/UPE. That takes a lot of volunteer time, as I can attest through my experince at CCI, VRT, and Arbcom. If the more "obvious" editing doesn't deserve more than a warning... than what hope is there for the "civil" editing to get anymore than a slap on the wrist?

In essence my argument is to be the change you want to be. Even when the process doesn't completely work one day, it doesn't mean the door is closed on it improving, little by little. That's why I do what I do-- it's because I know the processes are flawed-- and that every little action that can make things better... can make things better. You don't need to agree with me, or see eye to eye or what not-- but I do hope you understand where I am coming from. Thank you in engaging in this discussion with me. Moneytrees🏝️(Talk) 22:42, 16 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Which leaves me with a question; as you say, Chess has additionally engaged in this civil POV pushing, even if it is not the crux of my evidence against him. If you think that is more serious than the evidence I present... then why only ask for a warning?

This is a good point, and did convince me to withdraw my objection over there.

But I did want to say briefly that it feels odd to support sanctions for someone based on evidence that other people think is egregious but I don't, based on past behavior I've seen that's not in evidence at all. (In fact I specifically didn't present diffs unrelated to this incident because I was pretty confident that would significantly decrease the chance of anything at all happening, including a warning.) I don't in general want to get in the habit of this and am only supporting here because I think there's enough overlap that it's not totally unrelated.

---

Levivich at ARBPIA5 tried to get support for a "being right is everything" finding. It didn't get traction because the original framing was overly strong, but as a veteran of another CT I immediately got what he was going for. Whenever the GENSEX case opens I'm going to push for some kind of "being polite isn't enough, either" complement to WP:BRIE, whose content would basically be this comment. Loki (talk) 01:47, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. That’s interesting— “being polite isn’t enough” is similar to what Beeblebrox was saying around the Lourdes case. I think that is a good counterpart to BRIE. Moneytrees🏝️(Talk) 02:42, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Transgender healthcare and people arbitration case opened

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ANI notice

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Lover of lgbt literature (talk) 15:30, 27 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the interpretation of court documents

Just a word of caution about your otherwise quite reasonable statements regarding the inclusion of court documents on the page of a contentious BLP. This particular BLP maintains multiple blogs and the principal purpose of one of them is to generate self-favoring interpretations of all his court documents. If we begin introducing these primary sources on that particular BLP page any interpretation other than total vindication will be the subject of edit warring and etc. from the fanclub. I hope this explains some of my hesitance to open up primary sources with that particular BLP. Simonm223 (talk) 21:26, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The number of SPAs on that RFC makes me suspect that heavy fanclub involvement is a foregone conclusion no matter what. Loki (talk) 21:43, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This is probably going to get messier before it gets better. The new lead fanclub account, since Slacker13 got indeffed has begun posting spurious COI notices on the pages of editors they disagree with. Again. Simonm223 (talk) 21:49, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As I've noted in the RfC, IMO there is a far bigger problem with including any mention of the case based on court documents namely that in the most recent RfC where it was considered, the community was not very supportive of it even in clearer cut cases where the case itself was widely covered and we just wanted to report on the result, frankly mostly on simpler results Wikipedia talk:Biographies of living persons/Archive 58#Published judicial documents (see also Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard/Archive361#Ashley Gjøvik). Nil Einne (talk) 12:40, 8 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

We do kind of have an issue here where the suit was reported on but not the result. To whit the two academic sources that the fanclub have been trying to have excluded from consideration. This case was seen as being quite relevant to the limitations of anti-slapp legislation to prevent the use of suit to silence accusers who have reason to avoid the justice system. I don't know whether you are considering that in your considerations so I thought I'd bring it up. But, yeah, I've got serious misgivings about using a primary source when we have mixed judgments like this where some statements were noted as libelous and others were not. Simonm223 (talk) 12:53, 8 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion at Talk:Bashar al-Assad § Infobox image

You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Bashar al-Assad § Infobox image. Freedoxm (talk · contribs) 22:47, 5 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Talk:Shooting of Charlie Kirk

Hello LokiTheLiar, your edit removed many other contributors' comments. Can you please undo your edit to correct this. Thank you. McRandy1958 (talk) 22:18, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Dang, I didn't notice that. Blame an edit confict.

I can't automatically undo but I'll try to untangle it. Loki (talk) 22:19, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Alright, I believe I've fixed it. Loki (talk) 22:23, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you so much, these edit conflict issues from high-traffic pages are always an annoyance. Cheers. McRandy1958 (talk) 22:32, 10 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Rearrangement of Zak Smith RFC

Hi there! I hope you're having a nice day!

I posted this on @Sariel Xilo's page, as I had thought they had made the edit. Repeating here for your convenience:

Regarding the recent rearrangement of the RFC above - my comments in reply to "Morbidthoughts (talk) 23:57, 24 August 2025 (UTC)" got folded into a collapsed section you made called "Extended discussion in survey section".

When I posted that comment for discussion, there was no separate section for discussion/survey for me to post into, so it was in the correct location at the time. It is only after your rearrangement that it appears misplaced. Could you please move it into the recently created "discussion" section, since that's what it is, instead of folding it into the collapsed section?

It's also a single comment with no replies, and thus I do not believe it is correct to call it an "extended discussion". The other comments in that section contain a lot of back-and-forth; mine does not. The extended discussion in question comes from two comments with replies - (1) "Itstheschist (talk) 23:28, 29 August 2025 (UTC)", with replies related to that comment's content, which is "Wikipedia requires that reliable sources are independent". And (2) another by White Spider Shadow (talk) 20:58, 30 August 2025 (UTC) that has been collapsed as LLM. None of the discussion in either replies to, or addresses, my comment.[reply]

Thank you much! Winstonbury (talk) 03:36, 11 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Collapsing that section wasn't a judgement about any individual in it, just that the discussion itself was so long it obscured what the top level opinions were.

Also, it looks to me from the indentation that other people did reply to you. In fact it appears that the entire discussion branched off your comment so I can't really move your comment without moving all of it. Loki (talk) 04:17, 11 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hiya! No stress; I wasn't sure why it had been collapsed, so I just addressed some of the potential reasons.

If it looks like that from the indentation, then the indentation has become muddled up in the restructuring. The original indentation was all branching off the original comment by Morbidthoughts; there were no replies to my comment. I had checked back a few times to see if anyone had responded and they had not. You can see this from the context - both Itstheschist and White Spider Shadow directly address comments in Morbidthoughts' comment, not mine.

In any case; If moving it is tricky, you have my permission to copy my whole comment and move it into Discussion.

Thank you! Winstonbury (talk) 04:44, 11 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, just checking in - are there any lingering issues you need help with before you move or copy my comment into discussion? Thanks. Winstonbury (talk) 04:39, 13 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you! I know it's chaos in there. Cheers. Winstonbury (talk) 07:25, 15 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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Talk:Conversion therapy/Lead

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Proposed decision for Transgender healthcare and people posted

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