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 == The Signpost: 13 February 2012 == 

  

  

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 Hello.  I just want to point out that I recently read an article in the chronicle here:  http://chronicle.com/article/The-Undue-Weight-of-Truth-on/130704/ and it describes what amounts to an edit war that you were engaged in.  I looked at the page and discussion in question, and it seems to me that you are boorish and a bully.  I would like to suggest that you tone down your air of self-righteous authority, in order to encourage a more civil atmosphere on Wikipedia.  It's especially ironic that when presented with what seems to be a very civil point by (presumably) the author of the blog, you ignored the substance of his argument and instead groundlessly accused him of being uncivil himself.  If you're going to wear that hat of uncontested arbitrator of *TRUTH*, it would be helpful if you at least justified your claims in detail to those who go to the trouble of trying to actually discuss the truth in a balanced fashion using reliable sources.  As it stands, you arbitrarily call seemingly reliable sources ""unreliable"", and other sources that support your preferred narrative ""reliable,"" and this makes you an awful bully.  Please consider changing your behavior and attitudes.  Best regards.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by   •    

 :This is what happened on the talk page three years ago. I've long said that editors here can and do go (way) too far with WP:UNDUE and at the time, I didn't cite that policy to Messer-Kruse, someone else did. I did remind him about WP:RS, the sourcing policy, given he was citing a blog. Three years ago, for sundry reasons, cites to blogs of any kind were even harder to get into an article here than they are today. In the meantime, he got his research published. When this did come up again on the talk page the other day, I thought the IP who linked to the Chronicle article was being helpful (still do) and said what I thought about how UNDUE can easily skew what an article carries. Through all this, please keep in mind that Haymarket is still a highly PoV topic. Messer-Kruse himself has shown how flawed the sources on this are. As an aside, I looked into the topic quite deeply years ago (before there was a Wikipedia) and came away thinking that both the Chicago business/government ""side"" and the so-called ""anarchists"" wrought awful, deadly wrongs throughout the whole sad tale of the strikes, the bombing and the trial. I dare say, there are still meaningful things we don't know about the bombing and we may never know. Chicago still has one of the most corrupt city governments in North America and this has often and long been tangled up with corruption within the labor unions which sprang up in that era. In putting volunteer time into building a tertiary source article on the topic, one does what one can with flawed sources and the sometimes daunting ways of open editing.    
 ::Gwen, the past is the past so let's move forward.  However, let's clear up a few things.  Messer-Kruse was an expert when he first came to Wikipedia, and he already had published articles on the subject.  As he has said, ""I had cited the documents that proved my point, including verbatim testimony from the trial published online by the Library of Congress. I also noted one of my own peer-reviewed articles.""  So, he included a solid primary and secondary source, which is acceptable.  I also think that in this particular instance, the minority or undue clause