User talk:Upplysning

. Please might I ask why you cut the Palestine page down to a stub? Surely people need to know the history of Palestine, which is not given in any substance on the Israel page. Matt58 (talk) 11:23, 4 January 2021 (UTC)

Mostly written by trolls and mostly consisting of ridiculous, dubiously sourced, and/or unsourced material. That you apparently want to include such poor and harmful troll material, written by banned trolls, in Metapedia is very concerning. Upplysning (talk) 16:33, 4 January 2021 (UTC)

That you see yourself as the highly opinionated arbiter of sources and the other things you mention is actually far more concerning and damaging to Metapedia. I asked a respectful question and failed to get a courteous response. I am happy to re-examine the Palestine page given that what goes on there affects us all to this day. Matt58 (talk) 12:56, 5 January 2021 (UTC)

Again, that you apparently want to include such poor and harmful troll material, written by banned trolls who have done extensive harm to Metapedia in the past, is very concerning. Upplysning (talk) 16:55, 5 January 2021 (UTC)

I did not say I wanted to include bad material, as you well know. I said I could re-examine it. The only thing "very concerning" here is your dictatorial attitude. Matt58 (talk) 09:58, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

Are you saying that I must go and ask you for your own personal approval and permission before removing harmful troll material? See also Talk:Martin Bormann on my observation that "Apparently only sources approved by you personally are allowed in Metapedia." This seems to be a dictatorial attitude. If you have any useful non-troll material regarding Palestine, please add it to the article. Upplysning (talk) 16:30, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

Michael O'Meara

Why did you remove most content? (And by the way, do you know why his pic is now missing?) --Chechar (talk) 17:12, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

No source, material added by editors known for adding dubious materials.Upplysning (talk) 17:17, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

Haha. What a joke. What about the countless unsourced posts of your own. Arrogance knows no bounds. Matt58 (talk) 10:20, 1 August 2022 (UTC)

Contact

Can you please send me an e-mail? There are a few things I would like to discuss in private. --Aurvandil (talk) 16:53, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Email is problematic for various reasons. I hope that we can discuss Metapedia issues somewhere in Metapedia, deleting the page later if necessary. Upplysning (talk) 14:59, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

If this concerns the dispute with Matt58 regarding the many disputed, problematic articles, usually related to anti-Polish/anti-Slavic smearing. Upplysning (talk) 15:45, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

Very well. This concerns your heavy-handed moderating in general, and how you are deleting significant amounts of valid content (see the article about Michael O'Meara for a recent example which I happened to come across randomly — I am sure there are many other similar examples. Apart from that, you are treating long-time contributors without proper respect or diplomacy. Apart from the dispute with Matt58, where I believe you have gone too far in many ways, you have simply banned one of the first administrators, User:NatAll75, with the simple explanation "Troll", which — regardless what you may think about his edits — is simply not true. You are treating English Metapedia as your personal website without the care and respect this project needs and deserves. --Aurvandil (talk) 09:21, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

Regarding Michael O'Meara, I simply copied exactly what Arktos stated on him. I admit I made a mistake by removing the picture of him. The other material was unsourced. Any other claimed example? User:NatAll75 is a somewhat subtle troll (see User talk:NatAll75) who has done immense damage to Metapedia. I banned him for mass restoring many extremely problematic troll versions of Metapedia articles. See Special:Contributions/NatAll75. By the way, many of the inactive Metapedia administrators made administrators by him, directly or indirectly, are also part of the same group of troll editors which has tried to destroy Metapedia in the past, or may be sleeper administrator accounts, and should at least have their administrator status removed. Why are you not admonishing Matt58, who has filled Metapedia with smears of Poles and Slavs? Again see Category:Disputed articles. This is by no means a complete list of problematic articles, there are many other articles with anti-Polish/anti-Slavic smearing. Upplysning (talk) 10:26, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

NatAll75 is not a troll since I know who the person is. Neither are all of the old administrators trolls – many of them might have been so called "wignats", or even crazy, but I suspect only one or maybe two might have had ill intentions. I'm sure I can find plenty of additional examples of heavy-handed moderation and editing, since the Michael O'Meara article was something I literally stumbled upon, and I haven't had time to follow the edits on English Metapedia over the past two years. Regarding Matt58, I just read through a number of the articles you have categorized as "disputed", and as a person with Polish relatives, I did not find anything particularly anti-Slavic so far. I believe you are overly sensitive and that you are abusing your powers immensely when it comes to contributors you develop antipathies towards. If I am incorrect, please point me to the worst "anti-Slavic" content in Matt58's articles. --Aurvandil (talk) 19:24, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

Matt58's primary antipathy is towards Poland, the negative material regarding Slavs in general (and the Slavic related Balts) is apparently a secondary extension of this and not as pronounced. What is the worst content on Slavs in general is unclear. But as noted many of the articles on Slavic/Baltic countries have various problems. Matt58 blames Pan-Slavism and Slavic countries for causing the First World War, see Causes of World War I. Also, all the 23 articles in Category:Occupied Germany and Category:Towns in occupied Germany concern territories and towns lost by Germany during the First World War and the Second World War to Slavic/Baltic countries, selectively ignoring the territories and towns lost to non-Slavic/Baltic countries.

Regarding the previous troll state of Metapedia, an enormous amount of effort have been made to harm every aspect of Metapedia, such as by making the contents weird and unreliable. For example, some of the photos and other images have been edited in photo editing programs to make them look weird, such as by cropping or altering the colors of the photos/images to make them look strange. I suppose this could have done by individuals just doing this for fun and non-political trolling, but sheer scale of it and just the massive amount work involved makes it somewhat dubious.

Regarding possible abuse by me, I will happily discuss any claimed examples. Yes, I have likely made some mistakes sometimes, sometimes removing some valid material by mistake (especially if the valid material is unsourced). Such mistakes, and other mistakes such as spelling mistakes, are likely inevitable when trying to clean-up thousands or tens of thousands of pages with text, having only some limited time available. Upplysning (talk) 10:02, 16 May 2021 (UTC)

It is obvious that you and Matt58 have diametrically opposed viewpoints on certain topics. Your inability to remain unbiased and nuanced on these subjects, while using your administrator and bureaucrat privileges to enforce your own viewpoints, is however not the correct way to handle these disagreements. By writing things like "selectively ignoring the territories and towns lost to non-Slavic/Baltic countries" you reveal your own bias, since you are certainly well aware that 95% of the German territorial losses were in the East, i.e. to precisely Slavic and Baltic countries. What you are basically saying is that Matt58 is anti-Slavic because he did not also create a similar article about Strasbourg.

While I appreciate what you have done for the Metapedia project, English Metapedia is currently more or less a one-man project, and you are about to scare away the few productive and serious editors that remain, and that we sorely need in order to grow. It seems you have started to view English Metapedia as your personal project, which is emphasised by your unilateral decision to just delete your entire talk page in the middle of this important discussion, before I had a chance to write this reply. I therefore revoked your administrator and bureaucrat privileges until further notice.

I am happy to discuss these things further, but from now, I urge you practice a bit more restraint in your editing, while I will make an effort to kickstart the activity on English Metapedia to give this language edition the activity level it deserves. --Aurvandil (talk) 15:12, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

Germany lost far more than 95% of its territory to non-Slavic/non-Baltic countries during the World Wars, having lost territories to Belgium, Denmark, and France, not counting the colonies lost mainly to Britain, all of this viewed as unjust by many Germans at one time, but Matt58 only describes, at length and in numerous articles, territories lost to Slavic/Baltic countries as occupied, despite being unable to mention a single significant German organization that today considers these territories to be occupied. It was two weeks since the last reply, and I thought you had made your point and I thought it understood from the beginning that this discussion should eventually be deleted, as it was supposed to be a private discussion, as stated at the beginning of the section. Upplysning (talk) 15:29, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Upplysning's knowledge is skewed. In continental Europe the WW1 territorial losses in the west were miniscule except for the disputed provinces of Alsace-Lorraine. The archival evidence demonstrates that Germany and Austria felt the loss of their eastern and southern territories to the Slavs was without doubt their greatest grievance and one of the principal Causes of World War II. There remains today a groundswell of patriotic opinion in Germany about the post-WWII lost homelands and this is demonstrated, for instance, by the several Facebook pages set up by both individuals and organisations. Moreover several magazines and news-sheets keeping alive the memory etc., are published. One can only conclude that Upplysning supports the WWII Allies in their criminal land grabs which should be condemned for all time. Matt58 (talk) 08:33, 1 August 2022 (UTC)

Retirement

There are, as you have told me previously, when there were more private forms of communications, other considerations than those stated in Metapedia publicly, such as not openly stated considerations regarding Arktos and individuals closely associated with it. There may well now be additional such considerations, but which I do not know of. Matt58 has now declared his own dubious personal views to be the undisputed and final truths as well as deleted many talk pages with my arguments and also deleted other materials, such as disputed templates, so many of my arguments and even what issues I criticize (which are not limited to topics involving Poland and Slavs) can longer be read, making further discussions pointless. Furthermore, removing my administrator status also makes participation by me in Metapedia pointless, as I can no longer edit the many important protected pages, despite that most are not part of any dispute with Matt58. I hope English Metapedia will now not just stagnate into non-activity and irrelevance, as is the case for so many other Metapedia language versions, those few that are active seem to often depend on the contributions of one or a few very active volunteer editors, with most editors quickly becoming inactive. Or maybe English Metapedia will again be infiltrated by more or less subtle trolls (if they do not consider the changes by Matt58 to already be sufficiently harmful), aiming to again make it Metapedia a burden rather than an asset for the mission stated in Metapedia's mission statement, again adding more or less subtly incorrect and ridiculous material, possibly even again going to the extent of including material that is, more or less subtly, crime and violence glorifying, quasi-illegal, and/or illegal, making it dangerous to risk having any associations with Metapedia.

I retire from Metapedia, wanting no further associations with it, and request that my account should be permanently blocked. Upplysning (talk) 15:30, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Total bollocks. Matt58 (talk) 10:19, 1 August 2022 (UTC)

Or maybe Metapedia will experience a renaissance of new activity, now that — after almost two years of zero (0) new contributors being able to join — new accounts can finally be added again. I know for a fact that there is a huge backlog of volunteers who're waiting for a chance to get started.

Furthermore, I'm sure Matt58 is a reasonable fellow who is willing to accept justified modifications to articles created by him if he is treated with due respect. I don't share your pessimistic view of Metapedia's future at all.

In any case, I will grant your wish and permanently block your account. In spite of my criticism, I thank you for the time and hard work you have invested in this important project. --Aurvandil (talk) 15:50, 1 June 2021 (UTC)