5 November 2012 UTC I ve been off wiki during this whole thing so this is my first opportunity to respond I m amazed that Bidgee was unblocked after his unblock request and the ensuing discussion which only made things worse They started off complaining about the IP which is a classic reaction to a block and normally enough in and of itself to decline the request They got even more strident essentially making demands and threats and attacking admins who disagreed with them Bidgee even had the gall to say they wanted to work with Materialscientist who was willing to conditionally unblock rather than BWilkins who was not I m ignoring you I don t even see that Bidgee actually agreed to Materialscientist s rather generous condition Also the unblock reason is not very clear I don t see any evidence of Gibraltar Hill being locked Actually I m glad it wasn t because it would have made the condition meaningless As for my block in the first instance first I don t see socks lurking around every corner Perhaps that comes from lack of experience but no one accused the IP of being a sock and usually those accusations fly at the drop of a hat Moreover just because they are an IP who seems to know the ropes doesn t automatically make them a sock it just means they have experience here before I did NOT assume they were a newbie Socking requires something more than using more than one account the purpose has to be illegitimate In any event I m not saying that they are not a sock only that it s not as clear to me and based on the record it didn t excuse Bidgee s behavior Second I looked long and hard at whether both editors should be blocked My first look at the article s history automatically set off alarm bells and at first glance looked like a classic block them both situation However I went to the trouble to look more closely at the edits reverts and even the discussion on the talk page I m not going to provide everyone with diffs because I m already going into too much detail defending my actions What I saw though was a fairly typical battle between an experienced editor and an IP where Bidgee treated the IP dismissively and frankly arrogantly There was no reason to template the IP and label their edits vandalism One of Bidgee s reverts was to reinsert a grammatical error into the article and that wasn t part of a larger revert that was all there was to the revert Bidgee didn t come to ANEW to discuss the issue They apparently just assumed they didn t need to By my count Bidgee transgressed 3RR but the IP did not I took into account the nature of the edits when counting Bidgee did not revert again after the report was filed but they edited the article In my view when you re reported for edit warring you stop editing completely you don t say as Bidgee did above I can edit as long as I don t revert You don t even permit someone to draw an inference that their edit might constitute a revert Again this is an indication of someone with a poor grasp of policy and an inability to control their behavior Nonetheless because the IP also edited the article and did so first that wasn t a material factor in my decision Finally going back to the present again I m a bit disturbed that Bidgee has been given so much support by Gnangarra and Nick D I have no problem that they disagree with the block or even feel that Bidgee should be unblocked but my interpretation of the discussion above yields more than that particularly an implicit endorsement of Bidgee s post block behavior which in many ways was worse than their conduct leading up to the block 13 10