I am here to appeal a namespace ban from the namespace "Wikipedia:" that was imposed on me back in November. At the time, I believed that a ban was far too harsh a measure. And indeed, it would have been, and likely would have resulted in little more than a warning, had it been the only issue in and around project space. I was banned for misuse of WP:BOLD, failure to heed and understand WP:CONSENSUS, and first and foremost, WP:CIR.
WP:CIA's first sentence is People learn at different rates.
Some things I learned slower than others. I was still incompetent in some parts of Wikipedia, and could accept blatant spam, while only a month later deliver important comments in an RfC that got mentioned on WP:IRITALK. With my mentor's help, I was able to remedy my AFC problem, but I still understood consensus very poorly. This was supposed to be part of my mentorship course, but alas, my mentor went inactive just as I was beginning to work on it.
And with the inactivity of my mentor, I was unable to gain competence in block-related areas, and misused a policy to deliver incorrect information to a blocked editor. Then, I reverted reversions of edits of Kashmorwiki's (WP:G5), and created this stupid AN thread. I was pretty sure that I would be WP:BOOMERANGed into a ban, so I gave myself a voluntary restriction.
Sadly, the voluntary restriction didn't seem to work very well to remedy my WP:CIR issues. Now that I had no mentor, I was no longer acquiring competence, so I entered a downward spiral. I began to repeatedly discuss adding archives to RfPP, and when the first request was archived with a general consensus of no, I opened a second on the same topic, unable to read the comments and get the message that consensus probably hadn't changed in two months. When the second went the same way as the first, I finally dropped the stick (but I still got mentioned at AN). Then, following this discussion, I expanded my (not-so) voluntary restriction.
Then, I decided to begin the path to becoming a productive Wikipedian. I requested pending changes reviewer, and suceeded. (You can see my review log here). I then entered longevity, nominating articles for deletion. With that, I had competence in AfD.
Late October came, and I made some very poor edits. It began with moving a page against consensus, then I changed a template without consensus, I edit-warred across multiple longevity pages, I made exceedingly poor comments at WP:RFA2021, the list goes on and on. This culminated in disruptive editing on WP:RfP, pretending that my edits fell under WP:BOLD, misusing WP:SILENCE... If I hadn't been banned, I likely would have been indeffed before Thanksgiving. But WP:RfP was the last straw. My voluntary restriction was replaced with a ban from editing Wikipedia-namespace pages. Since then there have been two incidents, both early in my ban, that I must explain.
Since October I had been in a content dispute with another editor, Renewal6, about a man's death date. I do not view this as failing to read consensus, as one editor did support my viewpoint (see User_talk:Chicdat/Archive_6#Death_of_Gustav_Gerneth), but I do see it as failing to drop the stick, as I only accepted Renewal6's viewpoint when I found evidence for it. I was clearly wrong on this matter, and if other editors see this as an issue with unbanning, I accept that. This dispute ended in an ANI discussion, in which I used WP:BANEX to make my first and only Wikipedia-space edit since the ban began.
The second issue also involved edit warring, which got me blocked. I was watching WP:VPI and noticed that an editor who had proposed something on the page, User:DSMN-IHSAGT, was making problematic edits elsewhere. On one of these pages, Names of European cities in different languages (U–Z), I reverted once per WP:BRD. Then I saw an ANI discussion, in which DSMN-IHSAGT was being reported as a WP:BKFIP sock puppet. This made me revert more. Then, I hesitated. The third point of WP:NOT3RR was about reverting LTAs, but how productive, really, was reverting edits that weren't even especially bad in principle? What I really wanted to do, of course, was comment at the ANI discussion, but I wasn't sure whether that fell under WP:BANEX or not. (In a later discussion, it was determined that it did not.) So I decided to notify admins about it. I messaged Enterprisey (User talk:Enterprisey#Block this LTA now, please). Enterprisey, however, was not active at the time, so I went back to reverting. I shouldn't have stooped to an LTA's level, but I was fueled by the personal attacks they were making. Then, I noticed that Thryduulf was online, so I messaged them. However, Thryduulf was apparently unfamiliar with BKFIP, so they saw an extremely severe edit war with both editors in enormous violation of WP:3RR. Thryduulf blocked both me and DSMN-IHSAGT for 36 hours.
I will admit that I now know by far the best way to handle this was to not make 45 reverts, but to instead place a non-cryptic message on Thryduulf's talk page before making a single revert.
I'd just like to explain one more thing. The comment on my talk page @Skarmory: Yes, it does. Maybe put the contradiction up on XRV 🐔dat (talk) 11:07, 7 January 2022 (UTC)
was not a back-end attempt to get my ban removed. Instead it was a simple suggestion to decide whether or not I can make requests, and which comment won out. The other user did not do this and I am fine with that. To be safe, I have not made any requests on talk pages since then.
In 2022, I've begun to make much better work. For instance, note the talk page history of User talk:Дејан2021 (a paid editor and copyright violator which I identified) and Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive1092#COI and disruptive editing, in which I was mentioned (but in a good way). While all of the list articles were made re-directs to List of supercentenarians by continent by @🐔dat, in a good faith effort to combat the flood of WP:NOTHERE, ...
My edits have gone from problematic enough to get a topic ban to combatting WP:NOTHERE.
Since February, I've mostly become a gnome living in Special:LintErrors/missing-end-tag, mainly because of this. I've fixed over 2,000 errors, and have done it without error, except in my first month.
If I am unbanned:
If I am unbanned, I will be much more careful, meaning that in the first six months:
- I will stay out of most noticeboards
- I will discuss all edits I am making before doing them unless
- They are requests
- They are edits that nobody would ever have a problem with, like
- Reverting vandalism
- Fixing lint errors
- They are discussing something
- They are implementing something I previously discussed
- If there are problems with my edits, I will not try to reinstate them unless I have understood what I did wrong
- I will try my best to stay out of disputes
Edits I mean to make if unbanned
- Request AWB at PERM; it would make me be able to fix more lint errors
- Remove myself from WikiProject Poultry
- Start working on the project-space missing end tag lint errors, according to the Firefly report there are 205,433 of them
- Propose a "Wikipedia Junior" at the village pump
- Request a rename (sort-of-clean start)
This falls under WP:BANEX (Appealing a ban).