Wikipedia:Requests for Comment/GoRight 

Thanks for your kind words about my comments. I'd disagree, though. I'm not convinced that GoRight was, exactly, baiting WMC, he was, more accurately, confronting some clear double standards. The edits which got him blocked for harassment were echoes of what WMC had said, and which had been supported by, as I recall, Schulz. Whether it was true or not, those comments were set up, GoRight just noticed it and said it, violating User:Abd/Rule 0. I'd call it uncivil, but on a scale not worse than what had preceded it, and certainly, because of it's mirror nature, more just.

I've tried to reach out to Connolley, but he rejected it, which is sad. I suspect that he's a good man who has fallen into some bad company. (Maybe they are all good men who have fallen into a bad constellation, some pattern that reinforces the worst aspects of the way they are working here.) The incivility serves no obvious good purpose from any POV except one that would hate the project to be successful, and I'm sure that's not Connolley's POV.

In any case, I have not denied the uncivil aspects of GoRight's edits, I've merely noted that they are easily explainable as a natural response to what clearly appeared to him to be an abusive cabal, and what he was seeing confirmed what was in the Solomon source. I believe that he is now able to see beyond that, and that he's learned to not make accusations that involve assumptions of bad faith. I draw a distinction between noting a reasonable suspicion that something is off, and claiming that it is off. I might note that a user shows characteristics of a block-evading sock, but I won't claim that the user is a block-evading sock unless I'm prepared to back it up with sufficiently solid evidence. I'll only state the former, as well, the suspicion, if the suspicion is clearly reasonable, so I'd just be stating the obvious, which sometimes must be said.

And that's how I've treated sock puppetry charges against me: if there was some reasonable basis, not matter how shallow, I didn't charge abusive SSP filing. GoRight clearly went too far, but he didn't keep it up. Meanwhile, he was blocked in outrageous violation of block policy, and I'm mulling over whether or not I should do anything about that. Baley has denied that there was any error in the block, and this is what actually might make it necessary to go for an RfC. It's pretty clear, it's not marginal. But, of course, RfC isn't the first step. The first step would be something like what I just did on User talk:William M. Connolley. The next step, for me, would be to attempt to identify someone Connolley might trust, to give him a friendly nudge. Has to be a friend, not merely an ally.