Talk:British pet massacre

Three odd sections

There are three parts of the article that strike me as a bit odd, or oddly written.
The first is this sentence from the lead No bombs were to fall on the UK mainland until April 1940.. This is a odd bit of historical crystal balling, there's no way that people in Britain could have now this and the threat of bombing was very real. So I'm not sure what it's meant to mean.
The other two are the final two parts of the Aftermath section.
The first, beginning Gray, who bred the Queen's dogs,..., link the Queen to the Nazi elite because they both had dogs from the same breader. Ok but what does that have to do with the article? It come after details of Britain's propaganda efforts, but still I don't see it's relevance.
The final part comes directly afterwards, beginning In 2017, author Hilda Kean published a book..., and talks about her book 'The Great Cat and Dog Massacre'. I believe this needs to be rewritten and referenced to the book. I don't think I've explained that well, but it's late here. Does anyone have any thoughts? Thanks 89.241.33.89 (talk) 01:20, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Just to note that the final two pieces are currently unreferenced. 89.241.33.89 (talk) 01:21, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

Block evasion

Iyo-farm who is indef blocked from Wikipedia is now evading his block by using mobile talk talk IPs.

• 89.241.33.89 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) (on this article)
• 82.132.224.32 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) (on this article)
• 82.132.225.244 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)
• 82.132.186.28 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)
• 82.132.220.245 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log) (which he has used in the past)

All IPs are talk talk and trace to Southampton. Also see edits at Ilford Animal Cemetery. I have reverted this users edits per WP:EVADE. Psychologist Guy (talk) 15:01, 2 November 2021 (UTC)

Non-neutral

Tl;dr: the current state of this article and the majority of its content are almost entirely due to the activist agenda of a single POV-pushing editor who rewrote the article in this series of edits in which the article tripled in size. They are now site-banned as a block evading sock. How do we best get the article back to an unbiased, neutral state that adheres to all content policies and guidelines and can be a good basis for continuing to improve the article?

Details:

This article needs to be cleaned up to provide a more neutral point of view, especially with respect to the use of the word holocaust, and if and how much to use the word in the article, in line with both WP:NPOV and WP:DUEWEIGHT. And also just generally to better represent the preponderance of sources rather than an activist viewpoint of an individual POV editor. The reason for this is primarily due to the outsize influence a now-blocked editor has had on this article.

Over half of this article was written by a POV warrior with an animal rights activist agenda whose only edits at Wikipedia were to push that agenda, in this article and several others. They attempted to rename Animal rights and the Holocaust to Animal holocaust (here). In the article The Holocaust, they tried to expand the use of the expression to include animal cruelty and the British pet massacre; an attempt which met universal opposition (see discussions here and here).

The editor was repeatedly warned about their POV-pushing about animal rights activism and use of the word holocaust, and was brought to ANI about it. They narrowly avoided a topic ban on everything having to do with the holocaust or animal rights, but only because they were indefinitely blocked first. This included the socking and block evasion that occurred at this article, as mentioned in the #Block evasion section above.

Their edits in this article are a mix of relevant content properly sourced, and a warped presentation due to everything being viewed through the lens of animal rights activism, and a strong bias towards pushing use of the term holocaust into as much prominence as they could get away with, rather than what the preponderance of sources actually justify. So their bias comes out more as a WP:DUEWEIGHT problem and lack of neutrality, rather than as unsourced content or original research.

So, that's the background on how this article got to the somewhat biased state it is in now, through the influence of this POV-warring editor whose additions to this article now comprise 58% of the article (per WP:Who Wrote That?). So, where do we go from here?

In an article about the death of nearly a million pets, the reliable sources are going to be not coincidentally in sync with the goals of animal activists in a lot of places, but we still have to go with the preponderance of sources to get a global view, and not succumb to WP:CHERRYPICKING the biased sources of animal activism.

As far as how to fix this, I'm of two minds about how to proceed. We could roll back to the last version right before they got here and essentially unilaterally rewrote the article: that would be revision 1042970177 of 7:50, 7 September 2021 when the article was 5,063 bytes. (Note that the word holocaust did not appear in the article before they got here.) In comparison, their last edit was on 27 September 2021 (diff) when the article reached 14,462 bytes. (It's almost exactly the same size now: 14,451.)

Or, given that a lot of the content is reliably sourced, we could try to massage the added material into proper shape, removing a lot of the bias that was added to bring it into line with policy. WP:PRESERVE would argue for this approach.

My initial feeling is that we should probably roll back to 7 September, and re-build from that point. I'm concerned that building on top of an edifice constructed almost single-handedly by a POV-pushing editor who was never at Wikipedia to create an unbiased article but solely to advance his agenda in as many articles as he was able to before getting site-banned, is not a good jumping-off point upon which to move this article forward. We should base this article on the WP:BESTSOURCES and avoid WP:FALSEBALANCE, which I fear is what would happen if we try to build on the current version. It could be that some, or even many of the added sources could be useful, but if so, content should be added back into the article by unbiased editors (i.e., everybody else) using the sources in an unbiased way. It's just too hard to try to deconstruct a contaminated article brick by brick, try to figure out which bricks might be uncontaminated, and where the right place is to move them, than to simply start from the last good version, and move forward. That's why I vote for a rollback and rebuild approach.

One additional point: Wikipedia's WP:Blocking policy supports removal of edits by editors who are banned as block-evading socks, as explained in section #Evasion and enforcement. This provides additional support at the policy level for rolling back this editor's attempts to bias the article per their agenda. I would like to hear what other editors think about this, before going ahead. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 00:15, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

If there is a history of warped presentation/interpretation of sources, the best course of action is to rv the potentially problematic edits. Reviewing per source and rewriting from scratch are similar in editor effort, and the latter doesn't leave potentially problematic text in the meantime. I've compiled the added sources below, many may not be that easy to access. CMD (talk) 08:50, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

I support reverting to September 7 before Iyo-farm started editing the article. Iyo-farm's edits were also problematic because they give incomplete citations including some old books and pamphlets which are not online to be checked, it is unlikely this user has access to these sources but they copied them from the book "Bonzo's War: Animals Under Fire 1939 -1945". For example, Iyo-farm added this text "Thelma Evans, author, pioneer of the corgi dog breed, and confidante to the British royal family, described a counter rumour promoted by British black-propagandists as evidence of Nazi beastliness, suggesting that three million dogs were to be destroyed in Germany calling it a "hideous holocaust" and "the greatest slaughter in the history of dogs", I am not sure why this text is exactly relevant but no page numbers are given. Iyo-farm often cites sources with no page numbers and appears to copy chunks of text from other websites. On the article Ilford Animal Cemetery, Iyo-farm uploaded copyrighted material. The Hilda Klein paper is a reliable source, it can be used. [3]. The article should be expanded and re-written with better scholarly sources but should first be reverted before Iyo-farm's problematic edits. Psychologist Guy (talk) 20:45, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the responses so far, in particular, to Chipmunkdavis for your list of sources—I was going to compile a list myself, so thanks very much for that; and to Psychologist Guy, for the example quote claimed to be from "Bonzo's War", which, even if accurate, is of questionable relevancy, being a second-hand report asserting the existence of a "counter-rumour" created on purpose as a fiction if the assertion is to be believed; that seems pretty far afield of what an article about a real event should be covering. It's a good example of why I think that even though the sources themselves may be reliable, nevertheless they were chosen improperly and summarized improperly by a POV-warrior to fit their predefined agenda.

As there's no hurry about this, I think we can wait a bit longer to see if there are more comments by interested editors before we take action. Thanks again for the responses so far. Mathglot (talk) 22:50, 5 November 2021 (UTC)

I agree with all of this. I have a lot of other articles to being working on but I would like to improve this article at some point but there is no hurry. Unfortunately Iyo-farm is still using IPs to edit the article [4]. Psychologist Guy (talk) 18:00, 6 November 2021 (UTC)

I support roIling back to the 7 September 2021 version. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 17:49, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

Me too. For reference, this diff shows all that would change in a rollback. Firefangledfeathers (talk) 17:54, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

 Done Rollback to revision 1042970177 of 7:50, 7 September 2021 completed. We can now improve the article based on the last known good version, including re-use of some of the refs removed in the rollback and preserved by CMD below. Thanks everyone for your contributions to the article and the discussion. Mathglot (talk) 01:17, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

Sources
. References