Chronology
Here is a chronology of the controversies that led to my being topic banned from editing anything to do with the LDS Church. It is not exhaustive.
Terms:
COI - conflict of interest, defined currently as "contributing to Wikipedia about yourself, family, friends, clients, employers, or your financial and other relationships" in the current Conflict of Interest guideline on Wikipedia. Editors with a COI are required to disclose it.
DYK - Wikipedia's frontpage "Did you know...?" feature for new and newly expanded pages
HEB - a Wikipedia user named Horse Eye's Back
LDS - "Latter-day Saint," shorthand for member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints per the Manual of Style for LDS things on Wikipedia
January-February 2018
As part of a pilot to promote LDS women working in the hard sciences, my students create pages for Denise Stephens and Laura Bridgewater. They both work at BYU, and this came up in the DYK nomination for the Denise Stephens page. The Denise Stephens page was nominated for deletion. Most comments that in favor deletion say that there is a lack of multiple reliable sources covering her. Comments in favor of keeping it say that she's obviously notable. The page is not deleted.
November 2020
Valereee, an administrator, said I should be making Conflict of Interest (COI) disclosures on the topic pages of pages we had a COI or potential COI on at the Conflict of Interest Noticeboard. I argued that this wasn’t required by the paid editor policy (which requires a disclosure in an edit summary, user page, OR talk page). Fuzheado and Andy Mabbet, who are also Wikipedian-in-Residence, agreed with me. Some people agreed with Valereee, notably SarahSV, and some agreed with Andy.
I created the Association for Mormon Letters Discord server. This is my main contribution to the Association for Mormon Letters community as an unpaid volunteer (board member). There aren't a ton of people on it, but we have enough active users to start discussions on various topics. I tried to get some new people interested in editing Wikipedia, but am unsuccessful. I usually just end up asking for advice on sourcing pages or posting when we have done work relevant to people interested in Mormon literature.
December 2020
SarahSV/Slimvirgin criticized my work on the Orson Scott Card page during its good article review. She wrote that I've emphasized BYU's connection to Card and have a conflict of interest. Barkeep49, who was reviewing the page, wrote, “I see no consensus that Rachel, as a WiR [Wikimedian-in-Residence], should not be editing this article.” Ironically, in 2021, I defended the page from another user trying to downplay Card’s homophobia over several months. SarahSV dies in March 2021.
October 2022
Horse Eye's Back (HEB) starts asking me about if I have a conflict of interest in my editing on my talk page.
December 2022
December 1 - HEB leaves more pointed questions about my COI on my talk page. He asks about my edits on pages for Joseph Smith, Gary Gillum, Hugh Nibley, and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in England.
December 6th - The Gary Gillum page is nominated for deletion. I had previously done some citation improvements and added more information to the page in conjunction with some of my work on the Hugh Nibley page. Later, HEB uses my work on this page as evidence of COI editing
December 16 - I complain on the Administrator’s Noticeboard that HEB is constantly accusing me of having a conflict of interest in my work without taking any actual administrative action, like writing up a case at the conflict-of-interest noticeboard (Wikipedia is highly bureaucratic). The administrators commenting there seemed to agree that HEB was getting caught up in weird minutiae, and gave him a warning. I assumed this meant that my editing was okay. Other editors saw the lack of actual sanctions against HEB as administrator hesitance to punish him.
September 2023
I started a project to edit Book of Mormon pages with four student editors. I tried to go about this carefully by creating in-house guidelines for sourcing Book of Mormon pages and asking for guidelines at LDS and Christianity Wikiproject pages.
October 2023
My student started started improving the page for Coriantumr. Another editor told us that instead of discussing all the Book of Mormon people named Coriantumr on one page, we should create a separate page for each Coriantumr. This seemed like reasonable advice at the time, and that’s what my student did. She nominated the Coriantumr pages for DYK. The same student also created a page called Book of Mormon monetary system and nominated it for DYK.
December 2023
HEB engaged in a long conversation about the notability of the Coriantumr (son of Omer) page. I didn’t participate in the discussion, since I assumed that my viewpoint would be dismissed, and I also didn’t feel strongly that the son of Omer person page passed notability criteria. I felt like the conversation was at a standstill and asked for someone to nominate the page for deletion; instead, conversation continued. Users brought up concerns that all the sources were from people who considered the Book of Mormon to be scripture. The DYK nomination was not passed because another editor noticed that while the pages were new, most of their material came from the original Coriantumr page and wasn’t new enough and long enough for the DYK nomination. (Much later, in September 2024, the son of Omer page was changed to a redirect to a list of Book of Mormon people after a deletion discussion.)
After the Book of Mormon monetary system page was featured on DYK, it attracted a discussion and was nominated for deletion. There was no consensus, but the editing that resulted from the discussion helped the page to be clearer about the speculative nature of the page.
January 2024
HEB is taken to the Administrator's noticeboard for, essentially, sealioning or what is also called "battleground behavior." The discussion was not just about his behavior in Book of Mormon spaces. I was asked to comment. I reiterated that I would prefer that HEB take his concerns about me to the Conflict of Interest Noticeboard (a place for people to post about users who are violating or suspected of violating Wikipedia's conflict-of-interest guidelines) to constantly questioning my edits (that way we could have other people in the discussion and we could develop a consensus about what I should be doing).
Giraffe Stapler started a topic about LDS editors on the Wikipediocracy forum (a Wikipedia criticism forum), describing some of my real-life connections to other editors and to two subjects that I created pages for from my personal account, Rwelean.
February 2024
Wikipediocracy started discussing Nihonjoe's editing on its site and forum. An Administrator's Noticeboard/Incidents discussion at the end of February concludes that Nihonjoe acknowledged his wrongdoing and that was sufficient. His case goes to the Arbitration Committee (this is different from the Administrator's Noticeboard/Incidents–instead of any volunteer voting on what they think should happen, a special group of elected volunteer arbitrators does that.). Several users cite his defense of me as evidence of his COI editing
March 2024
March 8 - HEB starts additional conversations on various Book of Mormon pages. One of them is on the Zeniff page, where I lose my cool and make a dumb argument that the "strongly discouraged" part of COI editing is unenforceable.
March 11 - jps posts on the Village Pump that he is concerned that the Wikipedia editing program at the BYU Library only employs BYU people, who are usually LDS. A blog post on Wikipediocracy focuses on Eric Jepson's habit of citing his own blog posts on Wikipedia and points out that he and Nihonjoe are both board members of the Association for Mormon Letters.
March 12 - Wikiproject Fringe starts to discuss LDS editing in the context of promoting pseudoscience. This is a community that takes pride in Wikipedia's scientifically factual information.
jps asks me to stop editing Book of Mormon pages.
As part of the earlier Village Pump discussion, AirshipJungleman29 proposes that I should be topic banned. He starts the discussion in earnest at the Administrator's Noticeboard the next day. Many editors participated in the discussion of my topic ban. Several of them had been active in previous discussions of me and my team’s editing. There were multiple concerns:
That we were engaging in conflict-of-interest editing–not necessarily on pages about BYU and its alumni (although we did edit such pages), but because of our religious beliefs.
That our use of sources on pages about the Book of Mormon were only from people who were members and that our prose was from a “fan” perspective.
That religious editing that assumes that supernatural activities could be true is a violation of Wikipedia's policy to adhere to a Neutral Point of View (NPOV). This concern becomes very relevant when trying to summarize apologetic material.
That I and my students were editing in conjunction with other LDS editors, and possibly coordinating our editing off-wiki (see Canvassing; could be seen as a form of astroturfing). This is where my real-life connections and administrator of the Association for Mormon Letters Discord server are seen as a Bad thing.
April 2024
April 12 - Arbitration Committee made a final decision on Nihonjoe's case. There are issues where Nihonjoe’s COI was not apparent without outing him (revealing his real-life identity), but outing not allowed on-wiki. In punishment for what happened, he lost his administrator and bureaucrat privileges, but he isn’t given any topic ban. Even though in the Arbcom decision, they state that his editing was paid, I believe Nihonjoe when he stated that he wasn’t paid for any of the COI edits. This sets a precedent for my case: you can have a COI for an institution you aren’t directly being paid for, and be disciplined for editing without disclosing it.
Per Yngvadottir at WPO: “Nihonjoe's COIs are an almost perfect illustration of the range of conflict of interest and how it extends far beyond payment specifically for SEO or even pumping up coverage of companies with which one is associated.”
April 13 - I am officially topic banned from editing pages related to the LDS Church, broadly construed. It appeared that administrators were waiting for the Nihonjoe case to close before closing mine. I and my students continue editing Wikipedia pages, but ones that are outside of our topic ban.
July 2024
A user named Victoria, in response to my students editing pages on American poetry and Louisa May Alcott, requests that my discussion of student edits be more transparent on my talk page. After this incident, I start putting editing feedback on the talk pages of the pages students are editing.
September 2024
I tried to appeal my topic ban, but I was not successful.
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