User:Ajraddatz/Requests for comment/Croatian Wikipedia (2020)

Category:Croatian Wikipedia

Previous discussions:

• Requests for comment/Site-wide administrator abuse and WP:PILLARS violations on the Croatian Wikipedia
• Requests for comment/Global ban for Kubura
• Requests for comment/Croatian Wikipedia-misuse of admin tools by User:Kubura
• Requests for comment/Administrator abuse on the Croatian Wikipedia

Summary

Over the past number of years, the Croatian Wikipedia has been noted for presenting a right-nationalist viewpoint in key articles, and retaining certain administrators who repeatedly abuse their advanced access to maintain biased content and suppress dissent. This RfC comes after a number of related requests over the past decade, and will accomplish the following:

• Summarize historical and current content and administrative problems on the Croatian Wikipedia
• Propose a feasible solution that will address some or all of the problems
• Conduct a discussion on whether the proposed solution should be adopted.

In order to avoid issues in previous discussions on this topic, the discussion will be more regulated than on most requests for comment. Users will be asked to provide one statement, with a limited word count, and to not respond to other users in-line. Further details are provided at the beginning of the discussion section. The discussion will also be strictly monitored and any sockpuppet comments removed.

Proposal

As a first step towards resolving the issues on the Croatian Wikipedia, the following items are proposed:

1. Users SpeedyGonsales and Zeljko are desysopped and banned from requesting administrator permissions for a period of at least one year. As there have been repeated problems with how these users have used their sysop access, this action will help restore some standard of behaviour for administrators and prevent further abuse.
2. Remove some key blocks, obviously placed as a means of suppressing dissent and for the purposes of furthering a political bias in Croatian Wikipedia articles. The blocks removed are on users x, y and z. While this is by no means an exhaustive list of users who have been unfairly blocked, a review by the remaining administrators will need to be conducted to determine which other blocks should be removed, if any.
3. Expand the Croatian Wikipedia's policy on the use of a neutral point of view to require that topics dealing with Croatian history should be independently verifiable in sources without a nationalist bias; i.e. sources from another country, or an alternative, where appropriate. As part of this expansion, create a page on the Croatian Wikipedia where problematic content can be flagged for review, and create a process for escalating the issue to stewards for enforcement if the local administrators are not responsive after a certain period of time. This part of the problem is very sensitive, in that there likely is a relatively high level of nationalist sentiment in Croatia, but we as the Wikimedia movement need to present unbiased content.

After being in force for two years, the situation should be reviewed to determine if further action is required to resolve any remaining or new problems.