QUOTE(A Horse With No Name @ Thu 12th November 2009, 4:02am)
Meanwhile, in Oceania:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=325262411I like how Manning rewrites history: "For the record, ArbCom did not officially desysop him. He admin bit was temporarily removed for the duration of the case (a standard procedure whever an admin is a central subject of a case)."
For the record, that is not standard procedure - Piotrus was actually involved in a similar situation last year and his adminship was not removed, a point that he cited early in this debacle.
It may not be *the* standard procedure, but it sure is *a* standard procedure -- just like Manning said. As Andrew Tanenbaum said, the good thing about standards is there are so many of them to choose from. ArbCom picks the standard procedure to use based on how much it likes the accused. In this case, the accused were painted as "outsiders plotting against us", xenophobia was invoked and no arbitrator had friendship-related qualms, so the decision was obvious, and inspired by Cardassian justice.
By the way, while we're on the subject of precision in language, I would like to point out that whatever it is that ArbCom does, it is not arbitration in the legal sense. It is useful to keep in mind when preparing for a legal action.
QUOTE
There have been countless cases of admins in the center of controversies whose tools were not immediately yanked away at the start of an investigation - the most recent being the Law/TU case where three Arbcom members (Casliber, John V and Luke) were cited as having advance knowledge of the Law/TU charade, but none of them lost their tools while the investigation was underway.
That's because there's *another* standard procedure at play for friends of ArbCom members.