QUOTE(Achromatic @ Fri 16th October 2009, 10:37am)
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QUOTE(Abd @ Thu 15th October 2009, 7:11pm)
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I'm subscribed to the list now, and, suffice it to say, the above is a vast ABF oversimplification of what these editors do.
You don't think it's at all possible that since the list is effectively "public" now (for it certainly wasn't openly advertised before), that behavior on-list might be a little "different" to how it was?
If course it's possible. But I can also read the archive, and have read a fair amount of it. I can also read between the lines, possibly better than most, I have well over twenty years of experience with observing (and sometimes participating in) on-line conflict.
What has been done with the list is
cherry-picking a great deal of traffic, abstracting and quoting from it the most negative snippets which could be found, ripped from context. On a private list -- and sometimes in an open forum like WR -- people will dump their feelings, express their frustrations, imagine extreme solutions. There are members of the list who have strong feelings and who have a battlefield mentality, indeed, but there are others who are more balanced.
List members are not all the same, and they should not be collectively judged based on the actions or expressed feelings or intentions of others.
Remarkably, in the proposed decision by Coren, one of the more factionally-contentious editors, one who clearly violated policy, and in an actually damaging way, by disclosing his account password on-list, isn't being banned. That's a clue!
There is one reasonably legitimate usage of the list, which is to confirm what would already appear from on-wiki edit history. It was laid out in the discussions at the beginning of the RfAr, that legitimate usage, I'll describe it below. But what has happened is that, once it was accepted that the list could be examined, a different agenda got attached and implemented, an agenda to discourage, though strict punishment of list members, further off-wiki communication and the resulting coordination.
Coordination isn't harmful, in itself, it is, in fact, a necessity for Wikipedia to become more efficient, which is a necessity for it to survive. Coordination in violating policy is harmful, but that is always a matter of action, not intention. I.e.,
discussing coordination but never implementing it in a policy-violating way should not be a sanctionable offense.The legitimate usage: to confirm and validate the treatment of a set of editors as if they were a single editor. Such sets can be identified on-wiki, and, indeed, if no pattern of on-wiki behavior were identifiable, the off-wiki communication would be completely irrelevant. I've explained it before, but, again:
On-wiki behavior: A is revert warring at an article. B, who has never edited that article before, perhaps, intervenes, supporting A's position. A and B together, if considered as a single editor, would have crossed the 3RR line. Is this a sanctionable offense?
No, not by itself. If, however, B is warned that cooperating with another editor in revert warring, as distinct from cooperating in seeking consensus, could result in a block, even if B does not cross 3RR, and B continues, then B could be sanctioned.
If there is on-wiki evidence of regular intervention like this, the judgment that B is revert warring, even with only a single revert, gets easier, or it should. In fact, this was an issue I raised at RfAr, and ArbComm punted. It was the core of the cabal issue, and the evidence I presented was all of sufficient on-wiki cooperation, pursuing a single POV, to establish "involvement," but
I would not have dreamed of asking that cabal editors be sanctioned for "membership." ArbComm reacted in a knee-jerk manner to the cabal claim, considering it a personal attack, which it wasn't. The cooperation, in itself, was legitimate; what was a problem was failure to consider it when making decisions about consensus.
Evidence of off-wiki communication could make retrospective analysis of such cooperation easier, but
the basic principle of not sanctioning without violation after warning should apply to such retrospective consideration. There is an attempt being made here to harshly sanction behavior that, if it happened openly, might have resulted in no sanction at all. The reason would be that it's difficult to discover such coordination; and there is a principle in criminal law that difficult-to-discover behavior gets punished more severely, so that the expected cost of the behavior rises to sufficient significance to discourage it. However, that punitive model is not legitimate for the wiki, and it won't work with volunteer communities.
The legitimate usage of the list evidence, then, would be in issuing warnings to the members of the list that they may be considered as a single editor for 3RR purposes, certain !votes, etc. And the fact is that such cabals could be identified from on-wiki behavior, the list isn't actually crucial for that, and to rely upon the list is to rely upon accidental information which will normally only afflict one side of a dispute. From what I've seen, I have no doubt but that there is similar or worse coordination coming from the other major side of this dispute.
There is no harm to the project if a collection of editors is considered a single editor, provided that they have been warned. Their own activity could, indeed, become more efficient, since there would be no need to pile in to an AfD, as an example, if closers actually paid attention to this information. One cogent vote is enough, but it's also harmless if others add "me-too" votes, doubly harmless if they note that they are under a "collective editing" "restriction."
The determination by ArbComm, or an ArbComm subcommittee, that a collection of editors are an "editing unit," could reduce tag-team reversion and other related problems without actually hampering the ability of a "cabal" to effectively watch and maintain articles; it would merely force such a cabal, more readily, into dispute resolution, instead of what currently happens, that they rely upon collective "firepower" through bald, non-negotiating reversion and are only sanctioned if evidence of conscious coordination comes to light.
Is conscious coordination worse than the natural coordination of factional agreement without specific coordinating communication? Actually, my view is that it's less harmful, and whatever harm results is lessened to the degree that the conscious coordination is openly visible. But, currently, Wikipedia sanctions open coordination, calling it "canvassing." That's the error, in a nutshell. What is called canvassing is a part of natural dispute resolution process. If wiki-theory were being applied, vote counts would not matter. Discussion still might be overwhelmed by pile-in, but that is actually easily addressable, and if it were routinely addressed and dealt with specifically, by moving to more structured process when discussions become too large, there would be no motive for redundant pile-in, rather the focus would become making sure that the most cogent arguments and evidence are available on all sides. And that will improve the process, not damage it. Better decisions will be made.
I think it's been about two years I've been saying this one....
Any process which can be disrupted by canvassing or sock puppetry is defective and should be fixed. Preventing canvassing, in particular, is preventing communication, and communication is essential to the formation of true consensus, consensus isn't a matter of simply polling. That's not consensus, unless the poll discovers unanimity, in which case, who even proposes the poll? Efficient systems, if there is no opposition, implement, they only discuss where there is opposition; and, generally, in larger-scale assemblies, it takes two to cause a discussion to be required, more than a brief process to prove a consensus of all-but-one.
Consensus on a large scale requires communication within factions, so that factional positions can be negotiated efficiently. The danger of intrafactional communication only appears when it's important to know if an editor is neutral or not, and that, indeed, is practically impossible. Neutral is as neutral does, and when "neutral" comes down on one side of a dispute, it is no longer neutral. It may have been neutral originally, or not. Most of us have various prejudices, we may not even be conscious of them. Knee-jerk reactions are generally far from neutral!