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User:Catfish Jim and the soapdish leveraging admin tools to maintain preferred, anti-consensus revision at Thor

Having been on English Wikipedia for many years now and along the way having written quite a lot of the site's content relating to folklore and its various genres, I've encountered a lot of issues, as I am sure all veteran editors have. Particularly when editing topics involving pseudoscience, every now and then I've gotten death threats and been on the receiving side of attempts at harassment or intimidation, some of them even making their way to offsite publications. Yet I have in fact never encountered outright abuse of mod tools from an admin until today.

First, a little background. Over at Thor and related articles, regulars such as myself encounter a variety of drive-by edits. Most of them consist of the typical vandalism one sees on any highly visible article, some are the result of confusion, and far too few helpful.

One thing we see every now and then is a well-meaning user wanting to add a userbox to the page. Unfortunately, these users rarely know the material very well, and often seem to have not read the article. This has resulted in several discussions over at the Thor article, where topic regulars like @Yngvadottir:, @Haukurth:, @Berig:, and myself respond and continue to develop this and related articles.

To date there's been a clear consensus that the introduction of infoboxes tends to be misleading, if not outright misinforming, and provide nothing the lead does not. For the Thor article, clear consensus against infobox inclusion has been established since 2008, as indicated in these discussions:

2008: "Infobox"
2011: "Infobox"
2017: "Infobox redux"

Related discussion can be found at the talk page for English Wikipedia's Odin article, for example:

2014 & 2020: Talk:Odin "Infobox" & "Infobox (Redux)"

Earlier today, a user with very few edits added an infobox to the Thor page containing numerous problems (@SpyGuy12345:). For example, not only does this infobox have obvious grammatical issues (that'd be the Æsir, for one) but it also tells readers that the "symbol of Thor" is the swastika.

In reality, scholars have debated (and continue to debate) whether this is the case (as English Wikipedia's Swastika_(Germanic_Iron_Age) article makes clear, which our Thor article's section pipes to). In short, it's unclear if the symbol signified the sun in the ancient Germanic record, some other deity, or who knows. Similarly, as is common in myth, geneaologies can differ by source, place, and time: For example, Thor may well have been Odin's father during the Migration Period and among some groups during the Viking Age, and before that, at some point *Tiwaz (who became North Germanic Týr) is widely considered by scholars to have once been the 'sky father'. Add to that the great majority of these 'related' figures in the infobox are not attested outside of the North Germanic branch and yet this article covers Thor from the early Germanic period until today. Lots of issues.

All of this is why the introductory paragraph of English Wikipedia's Thor article so carefully says which corpus these relations are described in. The infobox presents no such nuance or care—useful for car models and battles, not so useful for complex figures from folklore. Then there's the issue of whether an infobox in these cases provides more information than the first paragraph of the introductory paragraph, to which consensus is that it cannot.

Anyway, I went ahead and reverted this addition and opened a talk thread, as per usual Wikipedia practice. Business as usual. However, I was soon surprised to find that an admin, @Catfish Jim and the soapdish: had appeared out of nowhere and reverted my edits. Eventually, after trying to get him to use the talk page and right before his third edit, he locked the page to his new, preferred version:

Only after locking the page did he decide to appear on the talk page, where he accused me of "vandalism" and warned me that he was an admin, with a threatening "suggestion" that I "stop", presumably thinking I'm a new editor, among various other odd and false claims. Catfish Jim also somehow attempted to put his decision to lock the page at his preferred version in the third revert above on me as my request because I had said someone ought to lock the page. Nice.

I'm not sure what is going on with this guy but, in short, what would have been a regular Wikipedia conversation turned into Catfish Jim leveraging admin tools as a trump card to get what he wanted, making no effort to discuss the matter until locking the page to the version he wanted before his third revert, and all the while making a variety of false statements. This highly visible page is curently worse off for it.

Ignoring the pros and cons of infoboxes, a debatable topic, Catfish Jim's actions here look to be a pretty clear example of abuse of admin tools to me. Given this behavior, I don't think Catfish Jim should have access to these tools. In fact, someone with more time than I have to offer might want to look through this Catfish Jim's edit history to see if he's used admin tools to get his way in other exchanges. :bloodofox: (talk) 23:24, 27 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I've unprotected the article. I agree that was a gross abuse of the admin tools. We don't do desysops at AN/ANI, and ArbCom (which does) usually won't desysop over one misuse of the tools. If there appears to be a pattern of this kind of tool use, then an ArbCom case is how you would remove the tools. Hopefully this was a one-off.

As far as edit warring is concerned, you have both reverted 3 times. I am going to block CJ&tS from that page for 24 hours for edit warring, because of the aggravating factor of his admin tool misuse. I won't block User:Bloodofox now, but I will if they revert again, as that will be a 3RR violation. Anyone besides BoO is free to revert to the status quo version, which (contrary to CJ&tS's comment) appears to be the the version with no infobox. --Floquenbeam (talk) 00:30, 28 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ouch! E Eng 01:19, 28 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ouch indeed. Catfish Jim and the soapdish (talk) 06:50, 28 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

After opening a Wikipedia tab, seeing pings, coming here, then examining the history of the article and then the talk page and posting first there ... thank you for removing the protection, Floquenbeam, the article has been re-reverted and I endorse the action. Bloodofox summarizes the problems well above, except that the scope of the article is all reflexes of *Þunraz, which may make the problem a bit clearer. I have only two comments on Catfish Jim, one, that I have no recollection of them making unwise admin decisions, presumably a bad day, and two, that this is an illustration of why we have a general principle that admins avoid using their tools based on content matters except in cases of obvious vandalism. (An unusually short comment for me; I gotta go.) Yngvadottir (talk) 01:31, 28 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Golly. I was expecting to have a few messages this morning, possibly even a notice that there was a discussion at ANI that involved me, which would be a first (I think). Blocked from editing a page... that's also a first. I admit I probably was in error in reverting the page after locking it at bloodofox's request. Bad day? You could say so but would that excuse a "gross abuse of admin powers"? I was attempting to engage with the guy, but here we are.

Anyway... I note bloodofox's request for me to resign or to be formally desysopped. I am absolutely open to WP:RECALL and will resign the mop if there is consensus that I should do so. Probably better to do that in an WP:RFC than here. Catfish Jim and the soapdish (talk) 07:35, 28 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Here would be fine... doesn't need to be a formal, drawn out process. Catfish Jim and the soapdish (talk) 07:42, 28 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I'd certainly say that a bad day (God knows we all have some of those, especially in this trying period) would excuse this, if it's a one-off indeed. However, I would also recommend you take another look at what the word vandalism means here, and perhaps also at wp:brd. Most of all though I wish you a better day today (and no RfC)! ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 08:14, 28 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I admit I probably was in error in reverting the page after locking it ... I was attempting to engage with the guy Is this a joke? You realize everyone else can see the full interaction? You were dismissive and assholish and called their definitely-not-vandalism edits vandalism and then you continued an edit-war after locking the article! The dismissive assholish edit-warring I could see labeling "I was having a bad day and probably acted badly"; but the second part? Get your act together and offer a real apology. --JBL (talk) 11:38, 28 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]