Background to G&K article: the user Icewhiz (part 1)
For main response to Grabowski and Klein see here.
This post covers the Wikipedia Icewhiz who is the principal source and driving force behind Grabowski and Klein’s article. Since this is a long story, this part covers events only up to Icewhiz’s topic ban on Wikipedia from all articles related to Poland and the Holocaust. Please read the footnotes at the end for links and evidence as well as additional interesting information.
For point-by-point refuation of Grabowski and Klein’s false accusations against me, see here.
Background
In approaching the article by Grabowski and Klein it is absolutely critical to understand the context it was written in, how it came about, and the person who made a major contribution, directly or indirectly, to its creation. That person is a (former and anonymous) Wikipedia user that went by the moniker “Icewhiz” who is currently site-banned, meaning banned not just from Wikipedia but ALL Wikimedia projects, for engaging in extensive and dangerous campaign of harassment against multiple Wikipedia editors. A “site ban”, unlike a regular Wikipedia ban, encompasses all Wikimedia projects and is usually reserved only for the worst abusers, generally pedophiles and users who are an actual danger to others. Icewhiz’s site ban shouldn’t be a surprise since his abuse included death threats and potentially rape threats made against other users’ children, in addition to the usual “doxing”, calling people at work and home, contacting their employers and encouraging others to harass them.1
For many people active on Wikipedia the figure of Icewhiz is quite familiar, as he was/is easily one of the most abusive editors that the site has had over the years but for the sake of readers who are not so versed in Wikipedia internal history it is, unfortunately, necessary to go over this background. This is particularly true since roughly half of Grabowski & Klein’s article is really nothing more than a list – almost word for word – of Icewhiz’s personal grievances, vendettas and yes, lies.2
Icewhiz
Icewhiz began editing the English version of Wikipedia in 2017.3 His initial edits were related to financial scams, he then moved onto highly controversial articles in the Israel-Palestine conflict area. He made a brief appearance in articles about American politics where he made a few edits which could be roughly construed as “pro Trump”. He also made a few edits which can be interpreted as supporting or defending the Kahanist Otzma Yehudit Israeli political party which has been described as “Israel’s Ku Klux Klan” by Haaretz.4 One other major area of his contributions on Wikipedia during this time was celebrating and praising A History of Palestinian People (title corrected 2/20/23 - VM), a racist book that was pulled by Amazon. In fact he nominated it to appear on Wikipedia’s main page.5
He began regularly editing articles related to Poland and the Holocaust in January of 2018. While some of his initial comments and edits were reasonable, he quickly veered into more extreme, hyperbolic, territory. For example, he claimed that freedom of press in Poland was just like in North Korea or Iran,6 or that, absurdly, it was illegal in Poland for Polish citizens to make edits on Polish Wikipedia on Jewish related topics.7 This is where I had the displeasure of meeting him.
In retrospect I don’t know if I can say that having known what I know now, I would have refrained from interacting with him, or avoided the topic area simply because he showed up. What I can say with certainty is that back then, in January 2018, I really had no idea as to what kind of person he was – a genuine sociopathic troll - and how much time and energy this individual was going to dedicate to trying to destroy my life over the course of the next five years.
In the following year and a half, I had many interactions and disputes with Icewhiz related to the Holocaust in Poland. I feel compelled to acknowledge upfront that not all of his edits were bad. He, on a couple occasions, did indeed identify existing problems with Poland related articles. When he did so, he faced no opposition in having these corrected, contrary to the claims he would later make. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of his edits and comments did not fall into this category. Most of Icewhiz’s edits during this period can be summarized as “add as much negative stuff about Poles to Wikipedia as possible and remove as much positive stuff about Poles from Wikipedia as possible”. Of course, there were instances where such changes were justified. But when the entire corpus of an editor so comfortably falls into just these two categories, then it’s obvious that there is a problem and that you are dealing with someone with an extremist agenda contrary to Wikipedia’s policies and goals.
The disputes resulted in multiple reports, mostly filed by Icewhiz, to Wikipedia’s “Arbitration Enforcement” board (WP:AE). Icewhiz, in fact, was the most prolific user of WP:AE, having filed a record number of reports (per month) on Wikipedia, a distinction which I believe he still holds. Icewhiz would seize upon any comment or edit made by editors he disagreed with, which he could intentionally misinterpret or portray in a bad light and go running to WP:AE to try and manipulate Wikipedia administrators into sanctioning his opponents. Most of the time this did not work and his complaints were dismissed, sometimes with a warning to himself. There were a few instances were his efforts did pay off. One of these is mentioned in the G&K article, when GizzyCatBella was topic banned, an incident that is worth revisiting later.8
He gradually just got worse. In addition to his previous agenda driven editing, he began making serious accusations against other editors, including myself. At first these were mere insinuations, done in a way so that he could have “plausible deniability” if reported to an administrator. But over time he began to escalate. This culminated in a “Request for Arbitration” he filed in May of 2019.9
This was in some ways a master class in false accusation by innuendo:
Icewhiz first presented a series of very old edits (ten years+) made by two users OTHER than me. These were users who had hadn’t made edits to Wikipedia in years (one of them by this point had been gone for more than ten years!)
These edits were indeed problematic and normally would be sanctionable. In fact, at least one, if not both, of these long-inactive accounts was banned for making them back in the day, if my memory serves.
Icewhiz claimed these edits represented “Holocaust denial/distortion”, which, as far as these particular edits, made by OTHER users, were concerned can be taken as possibly accurate description.
Then came the sleight of hand. After listing the above edits, Icewhiz smoothly segued into discussing me, structuring his paragraphs in the way to make it seem like I was the one who was somehow responsible for these “Holocaust denial/distortion” edits.10
He then mixed in a few of edits that I actually did make, but these for the most part were minor issues or straight forward mischaracterizations (for example, one of these claimed that I “admitted” not to having read a source, whereas in fact I “admitted” to not having read a completely different – which wasn’t necessary in that case)
He then topped this off with some generalities about the problems in this particular topic area, again, strongly insinuating, without any evidence, that somehow this was all my fault and repeated the accusation of “Holocaust denial/distortion”.
I will summarize this again for sake of clarity – Icewhiz presented other people’s, very old, problematic edits as if they were mine in order to accuse me of “Holocaust denial/distortion”.
An accusation of “Holocaust denial” or even “distortion” is extremely serious. Such an accusation can – and should if it is true – ruin a person’s accusation. When you find yourself facing such an accusation falsely you are put in a very difficult position. If you try to defend yourself, explaining in detail how the accusation is false, you risk that outside observers, who may not have time to investigate the particularities of the situation, conclude that “where there’s smoke there’s fire” and walk away with at least a negative impression. Indeed, when someone like Icewhiz makes such an accusation this is exactly what they count on – placing their target in a situation with few good alternatives. It appears that Grabowski and Klein are no better in this regard than this banned Wikipedia troll.
So I made the one response which I thought was appropriate. I told him to “go fuck himself”. Yes, of course I also provided evidence and explanation of why his accusation were false and how he was trying to manipulate other people’s edits and misrepresent them as mine. But at the time the number one thing I wanted to make clear to anyone who would look at this request was that the accusations were 100% false and that I unreservedly rejected them. Strong words were needed.
Wikipedia however, does have a policy on “civility” and telling another user to “go fuck himself” most certainly breaches that. In my defense I can only say that there are sometimes situations in life – and this was one of them – where “civility” is NOT appropriate (this is kind of why “uncivil language” exists in the first place). Predictably my usage of the phrase and some of the additional choice words I had for Icewhiz in this instance, have been then repeatedly dragged out and presented as evidence of my incivility. It has even now made its way into Grabowski and Klein’s article.11
The Arbitration Committee accepted the case. To their credit, they very quickly removed the two decades old accounts that Icewhiz brought up from consideration for the very obvious reason that, well, they were irrelevant. This limited Icewhiz’s ability to make his sneaky insinuations and he was forced to present “evidence” that actually pertained to me. This was and apparently still is a serious source of frustration for him – he appears to complain about it, via the voices of Grabowski and Klein, in the very article under discussion.12
One thing that the Grabowski and Klein article does get correct, is that the Arbitration Committee was very busy with other work during this period (the so-called “Fram case”) and as a result they spent an inadequate amount of time on it. Contrary to the authors’ and Icewhiz’s claim however, this actually worked out in Icewhiz’s favor. Had the committee had the time to look in detail into the evidence provided I am pretty sure that Icewhiz would have been indefinitely banned right there and then, along with one or two of his “Wikipedia friends”.13 In particular, Icewhiz’s practice of falsifying quotes (as in literally changing quotations to pretend someone said what they didn’t say) in Wikipedia articles in order to smear various authors and historians, was especially egregious and ban worthy. Of course, this conclusion is speculative on my part – as it is on the part of Icewhiz-Grabowski-Klein - since it concerns a “What If” scenario. However, some of the subsequent conversations I have had since the case, with the Arbitrators involved, does support it.
In the end, the Arbitrators adopted a “ban them all and let God sort them out” approach. Both Icewhiz and I were topic banned from the area of Poland and the Holocaust.
This is a situation where it’s important to get this exactly right so there’s no possibility of misunderstanding, so let me quote directly:
Icewhiz was banned for:
“Unnecessarily inflammatory comments”, “negative insinuations about Poland” and “Inappropriate ethnically derogatory comments” (my emphasis) - In other words, part of the rational for his ban was him saying racist things.
“Interpret(ing) an apparent error by Poeticbent as a deliberate hoax “ - This concerns the photo caption discussed in Grabowski and Klein’s article and it’s best to return to this later.
(Being involved in) “an unusually large number of AE requests as filer, subject, or commenter” – this reflects my discussion above about Icewhiz holding a record number of WP:AE reports
“Icewhiz inappropriately and falsely link(ing) Volunteer Marek to Holocaust denial” – this reflects my discussion above as well and at the end of the day, this was the main reason for his ban.
“Icewhiz has used inappropriate sources in BLPs, made negative edits to BLPs including editorializing in Wikipedia's voice, and made arguably BLP-violating edits on talk pages by posting negative claims or speculations about living scholars” – BLP is Wikipedia acronym for “Biography of a Living Person” This concerns Icewhiz extensive attempts to create attack and smear pages on historians and scholars whose views he disagreed with. I have not addressed this aspect of Icewhiz’s Wikipedia career because it’s best treated in following sections which focus on Grabowski and Klein’s claims rather than just Icewhiz.
I also received a topic ban. The rational for my ban were as follows:
Accus(ing) Icewhiz of making things up on numerous occasions - this was certainly true, because he did indeed make things up.
Appear(ing) to edit an article because Icewhiz did so - this is a reference to Wikipedia policy which prohibits editors following one another to engage in disputes. There was certainly a high degree of correlation between our edits but I never followed him with the express purpose of starting fights.
As can be seen the rationale for my topic ban was a lot “thinner” than that of Icewhiz. Importantly neither of these reasons were related to Wikipedia CONTENT, unlike the rationales motivating Icewhiz’s ban.
If one was to summarize the Arbitration Committee finding it was basically “Volunteer Marek accused Icewhiz of making things up and lying about sources and that’s uncivil so he gets a ban. Icewhiz made things up and lied about sources, so he gets a ban too” which is a bit… Kafkaesque.
Once we received our bans there were some final spill over effects as various other editors continued some of our disputes. I accepted mine and hoped to appeal it in a year’s time.
Icewhiz on the other hand could not abide by his. He almost immediately created sock puppets to try and circumvent it and continue pushing his agenda. But that was just the beginning.
In the aftermath of his ban Icewhiz created a twitter account which he then used to post personal information (“doxing”) of numerous Wikipedia editors and encouraged his followers to harass them. He himself contacted employers of several Wikipedians in attempts to get them fired. He also began calling my work phone and making death threats. He also used those same Wikipedia sockpuppets to make further death threats. And worse…
Icewhiz’s post topic ban history, his harassment and eventual complete banning from all Wikimedia projects will be covered in second part of this series.
Icewhiz, using a twitter account, among many other forms of harassment, posted detailed information on a Wikipedia user’s children, including their names, schools, and birthdays. Shortly thereafter several accounts were created on Wikipedia which proceeded to make rape threats against that user’s children. Those accounts were obviously banned and the threats expunged though a record of them being made does exist.
The G&K article comprises of roughly 19,694 words. Of these roughly 10,074 constitute “Icewhiz related” or “Icewhiz inspired” material, which makes it makes it more than 51%.
Icewhiz’s entire editing history on English Wikipedia (under that name). Click “oldest” to go to the earliest edits.
Short summary: GCB restored an older version of an article, a common practice, before proceeding to make further edits to the article. In the restored version there was text which relied on unreliable sources. GCB removed these unreliable sources herself in subsequent edits. Icewhiz took this to WP:AE but only presented the first edit – the restoration – but not the subsequent edits – the removals. The admin reviewing the report didn’t bother to check the history of the article and topic banned GCB.
Icewhiz's request for an arbitration case.
Note that Icewhiz was later forced by administrators to revise his statement hence the current version of the case page does not truly reflect the extent to which he was making these false accusations.
Interestingly enough, another instance of me using the word “fuck” on Wikipedia cited by Grabowski and Klein comes from a discussion on the article of Jared Taylor, a white supremacist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Jared_Taylor/Archive_2#Proposed_lede In that discussion I was frustrated with another Wikipedia user who was trying to whitewash Taylor’s racism. The user in question, “James J. Lambden” was active on Donald Trump articles where I had many disagreements with them. They still have an obnoxious photo of Donald Trump on their user page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:James_J._Lambden. J.J.Lambden disappeared from Wikipedia after being blocked for using sock puppets to make rape threats against my family, which very much resembled later such threats made by Icewhiz. J.J.Lambden left Wikipedia in January of 2018, just as Icewhiz began intensively editing Poland related articles and interacting with me. While there is no other obvious relationship, I have always wondered if there was a connection between these two accounts.
Incidentally, this is another piece of evidence that much of this section of the article was simply based on Icewhiz’s writings. This is a strange complaint for Grabowski and Klein to make. Its inclusion makes perfect sense however once you realize that this section is, directly or indirectly, written by Icewhiz who’s using it to pursue old grudges.
I am skipping the topic of Icewhiz’s Wikipedia supporters and “friends” for sake of brevity. Suffice to say that he did have and still has a small but very vociferous number of supporters on Wikipedia. On Wikipedia itself it’s pretty much an open secret who they are.
Ruin a person's reputation, not accusation.
The name of the article was "A History of the Palestinian People", not "A Brief History of the Palestinian People"; the rest is correct.