I have received multiple complaints, from multiple people, of two users, Dr Lekter and
Gnath. Dr Lekter has downvoted approximately 45 articles in two days, most or all of which contain the ACS format. Gnath has downvoted approximately 15 articles in one day, with similar patterns. It is unlikely that this is normal browsing, but it is in fact a deliberate choice to seek out and downvote articles within a certain format. Some things to note:
1) These users are originally from the French Wiki. We have communicated with the French branch and have chosen to judge their behavior on EN only as EN members. The official statement from the French Wiki regarding their position, for posterity, is the following:
We are aware of the two cases since this is the reason kaktus threw a drama on the French Discord.
The banner is part of the article and as such is a legitimate reason for downvoting it.
It is the indiscutable right of every author to add the banner to their new articles and even to add it to their old articles. But in symmetry, it is the right of every voter to downvote new articles that include this banner and to reconsider their votes on existing articles.
When you edit 80 articles at once, you can't blame people for voting on those 80 articles in a short amount of time (as long as the sole criteria of voting is the content of the article, which is the case here). What Lekter admitted after several days of being pressured, publicly mocked and insulted by the kaktus gang, is that seeking out these existing pages was prone to cause tensions and could be seen as extreme and 'unfair'. An apology that I considered to be unnecessary but Lekter was the one to deal with their bullshit and he tried the conciliatory approach. We know of the messages with Woedenaz. We helped Lekter writing them. Too bad Woedenaz is an hypocrite, isn't.
(I'm still not done) Even though I consider Gnath votes to be more of an impulsive bandwagon reaction, I'm fully supportive of Lekter's actions as they do not meet my criteria for illegitimate voting and the French staff know that it was not done with a malicious intent.Now, you have your own criteria for the assessment of illegitimate voting and only those matter in the end. However, since there is no malicious intent, it would be nice to let us know about it and to give Lekter the opportunity of canceling some of the votes before taking potential disciplinary measures.
Now, I think I'm done.
2) We do not currently have a set standard of malicious downvoting as based on actively seeking out articles of a certain content to downvote all of a specific aspect of content. Therefore it is ambiguous as to whether or not staff as a whole would consider this out of line on the offset.
Therefore, this thread is explicitly created to address whether or not actively seeking articles containing a specific kind of formatting or content in order to downvote them is acceptable user behavior. Because it addresses behavioral standards as a whole, I would like everyone's feedback on this, and am especially interested in crit, community outreach, and disciplinary team input.
(Note a related discussion here is contextually related but should be discussed on itself.
Living the dream, or dreaming the life?
(account deleted)