QUOTE(gomi @ Sun 17th July 2011, 3:35pm)
QUOTE(Rhindle @ Sun 17th July 2011, 12:20pm)
Willbeback reminds me of a badguy pro wrestler who hits his opponent with a foreign object while the ref isn't looking and when the ref turns around he has his hands up saying "I didn't do anything" even though a whole crowd of people know what's going on.
The primary difference on Wikipedia being that everyone is a bad guy with a folding chair and there are no referees.
I noticed a strange phenomenon well over twenty years ago, with "on-line conferencing" as it was called. For the first time, there was a complete record of interactions, so arguments over "what happened" should not take place.
What I saw was that people didn't change their habits based on this new situation. The same social dramas arose, and people took sides, and it didn't matter what had
actually happened.
What occurs is that people form interpretations of what happened, and believe those interpretations, these interpretations become "what happened." And then, even if they look back, the interpretations, the story of what happened, become filters through which they perceive that evidence. The distortion can become drastic.
Should someone come along who looks at the evidence and analyzes it without an axe to grind, they will then judge this person as biased, if they don't like the analysis.
So I saw this phenomenon in the 1980s, with an early on-line community. It's the Wikipedia story, and it's repeated over and over.
In RfAr/Abd and JzG, I had compiled, for RfC/JzG 3, a list of JzG edits to cold fusion pages. It was just to show involvement, and mostly it was just a pile of diffs with his edit summaries, very little additional comment. It was complete, not cherry-picked.
It was condemned by his friends as if it had been an attack. If an Arb hadn't compiled the same thing, using software, presenting it independently, I don't know what would have happened in that RfAr.
JzG's friends, I think, assumed that
his edit summaries had been written by me, or cherry-picked by me at best, to make him look bad. That kind of assumption about anyone involved in conflict, that they must, ipso facto, be biased, is larded through DR process as it actually takes place on Wikipedia.
What surprised me about the ArbComm leaks on that case was the extent to which ArbComm was quite ready to ban me, even then. From the case itself, as openly expressed, the only admonishment was that I'd taken too long to file the case! So, in the future, I didn't take so long!
And in the next case, RfAr/Abd-William M. Connolley, the ArbComm majority took over. Enough of this Abd nonsense, ban him! Which is what they wanted to do wiith RfAr/Abd and JzG but it would have looked entirely too bad, since the actual case was open and shut.
The next case provided plenty of cover, since the issues were far more complex. There are plenty of signs that most arbs didn't read the evidence.... why bother, when it's so obvious that Abd is a Troublemaker with a capital T?
That's just my story, folks, there are many such stories in the Wiki City. ArbComm is simply behaving like a normal collection of unsophisticated people, dropped in over their heads. There are a few who are, in fact, smarter than that, but it's overwhelmed by the majority.
ArbComm is quite what all those years of my experience would suggest to me would be created by the structure that was set up. It's not a surprise, they are not specially Bad People. Just ordinary people, dropped into and having chosen to participate in an abusive structure. It eats them.
And now we have an RFC, and what's more, an ArbCom case
