User talk:Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse statement

Summary of the conflict

I am a long-term contributor to the Wikipedia Mithras article. There is a vast amount of hearsay on the web about Mithras, much of it crudely erroneous. I have tried to improve things by checking existing material, adding references, removing rubbish, quoting reliable sources and generally improving the article as best I can, together with whoever is around. I don't sit on it all the time -- I have a life to live. But I don't see how misinformation on matters of fact -- opinions we all have, of course -- helps anyone. My position is to avoid expressing any opinion of my own, and to ensure the opinions expressed are all referenced to professional Mithras scholars. The flood of hearsay even affects scholars who are not specialists, so I have been driven perforce to use only those who are.

A couple of weeks ago a user [[1]] appeared on the article and started to make edits. Attempts to discuss these on the talk page (by myself and long-term editor Tom Hennell) were brushed aside by the user, who then proceeded to make dozens of objections and complaints, about the article and myself. The conflict relates to these edits. Another editor new to the article then arrived, [[2]], who acted in such a manner as to lead me to suppose that he was a sock-puppet for the first.

The edits in question are:

• He removed a reference to a primary source and its footnote, discussing the work of Ernest Renan. But he said on the talk page that he had never read Renan, and demanded that I translate it for him.

• He added a statement by religion scholar Marvin Meyer:

Marvin Meyer argues that "early Christianity ... in general, resembles Mithraism in a number of respects—enough to make Christian apologists scramble to invent creative theological explanations to account for the similarities."[118]

118. Meyer, Marvin (2006). "The Mithras Liturgy". In A.J. Levine, Dale C. Allison, Jr., and John Dominic Crossan. The historical Jesus in context. New Jersey. pp. 179. ISBN 0-691-00991-0. Retrieved 2011-01-20.

(I find today that he also added around the same time the same statement to the Mithras in comparison with other belief systems article and to the Mithras Liturgy articles).

• He then deleted two links from footnotes to sources not otherwise available. These were translations made by me on my research blog. The first is a translation of a portion of Servius; the second to a discussion of an error in the English translation of Cumont. I made these translations to give people access, and added the links so that they could use them. The action on the talk page suggested that these deletions were made out of spite, since it cannot help anyone to stop people looking at sources.

• His next edit was to demand a quotation of a source. But at the same time on the talk page he was complaining about the quotations in the references as being "possible copyvio".

• His next edit was an attack on the whole article and all the references, by adding POV and Cite tags.

• This was followed by three formatting changes, which are not in dispute.

On the talk page he was making various demands.

Potential areas of compromise

• Evidence of removing referenced material unhelpful to his POV

After encountering objections, CE has raised something like 50 objections or complaints to the article or myself.