Wikipedia talk:Requests for arbitration/Zephram Stark

message: * Zephram Stark (subject of arbitration)
* Carbonite
* Commodore Sloat
; Confirmation that all parties are aware of the request
* Carbonite | Talk 16:34, 23 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Involved parties

message: Please limit your statement to 500 words
Zephram Stark's behavior has been a serious problem for many months. In addition to the complete lack of respect for the idea of consensus, he had made personal attacks, used disruptive sockpuppets and made frequent rants against Wikipedia administrators. One extremely offensive edit summary  made by Zephram was "This place is a joke. It's too bad, because it had possibilities before all you fucking Jews came along. The funny thing is, I never had anything against you before this. Now I see what people mean."
His behavior has been especially poor on Terrorism, where he has consistently made edits and additions that are opposed by virtually every other editor of the article. He's created sockpuppets to support his positions and completely ignores consensus. Carbonite | Talk 16:57, 23 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Statement by Carbonite 

message: Please limit your statement to 500 words
::The things you say about Zephram Stark are simply untrue. You and your friends have been calling me a sockpuppet since I agreed with him on some points on the terrorism page, and what followed after I contacted a number of administrators was enough to make me sick. I was put in the position of "proving" I'm not a "sockpuppet", which I did to several administrators satisfaction, and I even emailed the founder of Wikipedia on this, because the principle of the thing was enough for me to do so. Just because I was formerly a "user" rather than an "editor" should not have made any difference in how I was treated, and I have since observed this fiasco with interest. I will re-iterate-I AM NOT A SOCKPUPPET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!--EKBK 18:10, 23 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Statement by EKBK 

message: Please limit your statement to 500 words
Zephram Stark's behavior on Talk:Terrorism has brought progress on that page to a complete standstill.  He constantly engages in personal attacks and he keeps trying to commandeer the agenda to hilight his own original research.  When his original research is shot down again and again, sockpuppets appear to defend him out of the blue.  EKBK's very first contribution to wikipedia was to jump in the middle of the discussion Stark was disrupting and to claim that he uses the term "FISA-terrorism" (a neologism invented by Stark) all the time.  (He claimed this after people asked Stark to quit adding original research to the article).  It seems odd that a user's first edit to wikipedia would be to jump into such a controversial fight on a talk page, to make a highly unlikely claim.  Stark has also made the "fucking Jews" comment another editor noted above -- whether he is Jewish or not, such attacks are entirely inappropriate for wikipedia.  He keeps trying to hijack the discussion on the talk page to focus on his agenda - sometimes laying out "criteria for definition" with the goal of turning everything back to his original research (and ignoring the fact that there already are definitions of terrorism in wikipedia that are not original research and could be useful.  I haven't been paying as close attention but I have noted that he is similarly disrupting the Declaration of Independence page with a bizarre theory about the word "unalienable."  But it is not the content that people are objecting to here; it is his conduct, which has severely disrupted work on these pages. --csloat 19:31, 23 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Statement by Commodore Sloat 

message: I concur with everything Commodore Sloat says. Zephram Stark is such a difficult person to deal with because, at least on the surface, he does not appear to be a straightforward troublemaker. But as anyone who tries to engage with him quickly discovers, he is unreasonable, belligerent and utterly dishonest, frequently resorting to blatant lies, personal attacks, and consipracy theories about the cabal of administrators that prevent him and his sock drawer from turning articles into his personal playground.
I have not been involved with his argument about whether "inalienable" and "unalienable" mean the same thing, but a quick glance at the pages involved shows that the sequence of events is the same as with Terrorism. He makes low-quality opinionated edits, shows a total disregard for the consensus against him, repeatedly fails to provide even the smallest shred of evidence to support himself, and makes increasingly hollow pronouncements that a compromise is close. Then we have the sudden appearance of a sockpuppet army and his descent into lengthy paranoid political rants.
I don't know what a reasonable remedy against him would be. Banning him from editing only the articles he has disrupted so far is unlikely to help, as he has shown no inclination to give up during the months this has gone on, and there are hundreds of other pages he could quite easily give the same treatment to. – Smyth\talk 13:18, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Statement by Smyth 

message: I became aware of the issue of Zephram Stark when an editor requested that I look at Terrorism and consider protecting it. As an edit war was clearly in process, I did as requested, and explained it on the talk page. From that point on, it was clear that reasoning with Mr Stark was going to be, to put it mildly, exceedingly difficult and wearying. Mr Stark has shown no sign whatsoever of understanding the nature of cooperative editing on Wikipedia; rather, his insistance on the introduction of idiosyncratic, highly POV original research, his continual attempts to control and manipulate discussion, his assumption of conspiracy and accusations of "corruption", and his invocation of sockpuppets to imitate consensus make it clear that neutral third parties need to study the evidence (sorry about that -- it includes wading through months of Talk:Terrorism) and come up with a solution to this problem. --jpgordon∇∆∇∆ 21:06, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Statement by jpgordon 

message: A cursory examination of  Talk:Terrorism and its archives will reveal what we're dealing with here. Zeph is, I am afraid, a one-person filibuster out to prove that any deviation from his point of view is inherently subjective, outlandish, ridiculous, biased, part of a lynching party, etc. His perpetually chaos-inducing editorial philosophy may perhaps be powered by the Energizer Bunny; no amount of reasoning, or turning the other cheek, dims the surrealistically obesessive nature of his quest to remake this article according to his own eccentric standards.  He is the single most consistently disruptive personality operating under a recognizable screen name I have yet to encounter on WP. I suspect he is one of those characters who is somehow entertained by inviting disciplinary action. which means we may be reinforcing bad behavior here, but folks, it has been months and, as he still refuses to put down the one-note megaphone he has hard-wired into this article.... BrandonYusufToropov 18:00, 26 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Statement by BrandonYusufToropov 

message: * Recuse. Personally involved. Jayjg (talk) 18:05, 23 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Arbitrators' opinions on hearing this matter (4/0/1/0)